[MacDV] Pram Battery--Old news Good Reminder

[John Collins]

Mark--I appreciate your interest-- I also was really surprised that a 
battery would cause my problems, which were really bad--that is I 
couldn't get anything to work consistently. For example, I first 
noticed problems when I would be working some video project and all of 
sudden iMovie would quit or a transfer of files would stop and the 
computer would freeze. Force quit wouldn't help. Then when I would 
restart, the drives (3) on the SIIG 133 card would not show up. I have 
2   75 G drives on the internal bus and they would always show and the 
external FW drives always came up. As I said earlier I tried my tools 
with no success.

Tech Tool 4 seemed to be working OK but very slowly and finally it quit 
in drive reading process and finally would freeze up and a restart was 
needed. The drives that it would not complete were those on the PCI 
card.  And other utilities didn't seem to help--Then I noticed the 
clock problem and put the battery in. I have had no problems. The 
restart showed all drives and the original startup drive worked fine 
(on the PCI card).

Since then I have done several hours of video importing and sharing 
back to tape (I am in the process of archiving old 8 mm video).

The computer is an eBay purchase of about 18 mos ago. I have never had 
any major problems--none that I couldn't deal with. But I have always 
felt that it was slower than I expected--lots of spinning beach ball.

I have also been concerned about heat build up but until this problem, 
I had not been too concerned. So any other thoughts?

John in Tucson
On Oct 5, 2004, at 8:38 AM, Mark M. Florida wrote:

> Honestly, a bad battery wouldn't cause problems until you pulled the 
> plug
> out of the wall...  And usually the problems only involve the system 
> clock,
> boot drive prefs, and video settings.
>
> If there are "too many HDs" in it, there may be a heat issue and 
> pending
> hardware failure...  Maybe you could move some drives to external 
> FireWire
> cases?
>
> - Mark
>
> On 10/4/04 9:42 PM, John Collins at johnccollins at comcast.net wrote:
>
>> Mark--
>> It is a G4 dual 800 with too many HDs and max RAM. So far it hasn't
>> missed a step. I have ordered a new battery to replace the old one I
>> put in.
>>
>> John in Tucson
>> On Oct 4, 2004, at 8:52 AM, Mark M. Florida wrote:
>>
>>> Just curious -- what kind of machine was it?
>>>
>>> - Mark
>>>
>>> On 10/3/04 9:23 PM, John Collins at johnccollins at comcast.net wrote:
>>>
>>>> I had major problems today--had been doing a lot of video work with
>>>> large internal drives and began having problems-- major slow downs,
>>>> spinning beach ball, sluggish at everything, could not restart to
>>>> primary drive. To make a long story short, I tried everything--Disk
>>>> Warrior, Tech Tool Pro, etc with no success. I couldn't get anything
>>>> to
>>>> work right. I had decided that I had a bad HD on an ATA PCI card and
>>>> that was the problem. I was all set to pull out the drives and go
>>>> about
>>>> the process of elimination to find the problem.
>>>>
>>>> Needless to say I was not looking forward to it when I noticed the
>>>> clock was wrong. So I pulled an old Pram battery out of a 9600 and 
>>>> as
>>>> you can guess all problems were gone.