Pongo_abelii

I had the same problem as Marc - my 2014 Skoda Superb’s Columbus unit randomly turning on and off, sometimes stopping part way through booting and other times working normally for a short while before turning off again. When the unit wasn’t in one of its brief operational spells there were also lots of very loud thumps from the speakers, sometimes when the key wasn’t even in the ignition! Given the extortionate cost of replacement units I was looking at third-party replacements until I found this thread. The Columbus was already unusable so I wasn’t risking a big bill if the repair didn’t work. The whole repair process probably took about two hours due to my cautious approach but my Columbus is now restored to full functionality. Huge thanks to pab567 for flagging this fix. A few words of advice/warning for anyone attempting the repair themselves… The connections to the chip are tiny. You will be working on a chip that’s effectively in the base of a box that’s about three inches deep. A couple of the connections are even harder to get at because there’s another component right next to the chip. I have plenty of experience with a soldering iron, including PCB repair training, albeit nearly fifty years ago! You need a good soldering iron, a steady hand and good eyesight. If you’ve not done any soldering on surface-mount components, have a bit of practice on a circuit board from a defunct piece of modern electronics. I thought that my soldering iron had a fine tip but it still wasn’t fine enough to reach the connections which were blocked by the adjacent component. I extended the tip by winding a paper clip round the tip of the soldering iron (keep the protruding end as short as practical otherwise the heat won’t reach the end). Very Heath Robinson but it did the job. Choose a non-corrosive flux that’s safe to leave on the board because you aren’t going to be able to clean off the surplus. I got my pot from Amazon - check the blurb before buying. You’ll use a tiny amount of flux but make sure it’s smeared across all of the chip’s connections before you start resoldering. Just reheat each connections until the existing solder remelts (no more than a second). DO NOT ADD MORE SOLDER as you’ll almost certainly end up with solder bridges between the fine connections. Good luck!