derek@leah.Albany.Edu (Derek L. / MacLover) (07/23/90)
The other day, my dad went to the Mac Expo at the Jacob Javits Center in NYC. He came out of the show with four more 1MB SIMMs, to add to the four megs already in the IIx at his office. (Technical info: the new SIMMs were Samsung 80ns.) I walked him through the installation over the phone, and he finished and rebooted, normally, to show 8,192K total memory in the Finder About dialog. No problems so far. So he started booting up his usual programs (in this case, WriteNow 2.2, and a couple of DAs in DA Handler -- Smart Alarms and Easy Envelopes), and this is where the strangeness begins. He was in the DA Handler layer, and clicked on the menu-bar icon to switch back to the Finder. Instead, he was back in WriteNow. So he clicked a few more times: no Finder. He looked in the Apple menu's list of open programs, to find: no Finder listed. I was on the phone with him the whole time, and asked him to quit out of all the open programs to see what would happen. So he did, and after quitting WriteNow, the Mac restarted the Finder (not the whole machine, just the Finder -- it flashed and loaded up the Finder without going through the system boot procedure). He rebooted and this situation has duplicated itself several times. He also replaced his System files (6.0.3) and the same thing occurs. He's taken all of his SIMMs out and switched the two sets. On rebooting then, the hard drive diode blinks once, and nothing happens. So, we both think, "it must be a bad SIMM" -- seems reasonable, right, since now the new SIMMs are in lower memory and nothing boots? He called up the memory supplier, explains the situation, and a few hours later has four new SIMMs to play with. He installs the memory as he did the first time, boots, and -- the same thing happens: the Finder disappears. Switches the two SIMM sets, and again nothing boots, following the same pattern as before. So now we're really confused. Is it the SIMM slots? A memory-address problem in the hardware? Does he have to be running System 6.0.5? With the original four megs in the machine, he can still function, so it's not a dead Mac. He _has_ had relatively frequent system crashes in the past, which we've attributed to buggy programs and low system heap space, but now it appears that they could be part of a bigger memory problem. Has anyone had similar experiences that could offer advice? Please? :-) thanks, Derek L., and his dad. -- + + One Mac is worth exactly 2.317 PCs (based on current price indices) + + Disclaimer: I was asleep. ---}=-------------------------` ++ All the busy little creatures / Chasing out their destinies --Peart ++