Re: Woah, my GS is acting FREAKY!

[greg@apple2.com]

In article <U8Lk4.146$dx4.11863204@alpha.sky.net>,
jmholmes@swbell.net (John) wrote:

> However, my control panel has, on a couple of occasions, actually 
> reset itself to GS defaults.  I had it happen again today when I 
> booted the system off the Zip Disk which has quite a few extra 
> programs that it starts up.  I was presented with an error saying 
> that Appletalk needed to be set up in the control panels for (I 
> believe) AppleShare to start up.  Went to the control panels and 
> found that it was like it was when I first got the machine.  Could I 
> have a battery that needs replaced or something?

It could be a dying battery.  You may have also run a program that 
corrupted the control panel settings which would cause them to reset to 
baseline.  I wrote a program once that, during startup, would rapidly 
change the border color, but it also modified a nibble it shouldn't 
have, so 15 out of 16 times it stored an illegal value in a reserved 
part of memory.  Result:  on restart, settings reverted to baseline.  I 
patched it to restore the value that was there when it started.

Presumably then, anything that corrupts the battery-backed RAM without 
computing and storing a new, accurate checksum would have the same 
effect, including a failing battery.

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