ragg0270@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Richard Alan Gerber) (12/06/90)
Here's a little mystery for you all: The system clock on my new A2000HD started running fast last weekend and kept doing so after numerous cold and warm reboots for three days solid. I thought it was probably a hardware problem, especially since the computer was roughed up quite a bit during shipping. So while I was waiting for my local dealer to check it out (which he never did), someone mentioned that a virus might be the cause. VirusX hadn't reported anything, but I had ftp'd some programs off some Fish disks, so I decided to check further. I knew that the ColdCapture vector was non-zero (as reported by VirusX and ARTM), but I thought that was due to "SetPatch r" command in the startup-sequence. Just to make sure, I removed the "r" option from SetPatch and rebooted. This had two effects; (1) ColdCapture was zero, (2) the clock ran at normal speed. Replacing the "r" option to SetPatch made ColdCapture non-zero again, but the clock still ran like a charm and has now for three days. Question: Is this just a coincidence, or did I have some sort of virus? This is not an intermittant thing. It never ran fast for a week, ran fast for three days solid, and hasn't gained a second during the last three days. While the clock was running fast, it still did so when I warm re-booted off a floppy. Unfortunately, I never tried a cold boot (turning the computer off) off a floppy. Thanks for any insights on this matter. Richard gerber@rigel.astro.uiuc.edu ragg0270@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu