[BrutoBlo]

Oh no!
My Pismo did it againg this morning;
I was reading some email and then, all by itself, the pismo shut down;
well, it brutally switched itself off, in 1/10th sec; (like a power-loss)

And then, after starting it up (and disk first aid repairing for 10 mins), the pismo was back in 1904;

My Lombard never did that;
Is there something I (or Apple) can fix to avoid this?

[Richard Pinneau]

Hope you have your Pismo warrantee registered. Can you say "new motherboard, please" ?
This is a "feature" I have not experienced (nor want not) on my Pismo.
--RP

[ATP Tour Fan]

I have experienced that about 4 times since I got my Pismo back in April. I haven't seen it since June or so, though.

I'd do a real clean power manager reset with your battery removed and AC detached.

However, I would get this problem just a fraction of a second after seeing an error window outline form in the middle of my screen, so maybe I have a little weirdness in my Pismo.

I've had this happen to me too...

During normal work with ac connected and battery in...

Power off. ( real quick not shutdown)

The day after I experienced a nice PEOF
error rendering my pismo unbootable.
(this was probably caused by the power off the day before)

The drive couldn't mount, but thankfully norton was able to fix it, and I recovered all my data and did a FULL reinstall.
( I just wasted 48 hours on getting the computer back up..)

one week after delivery, my A keyed failed to work properly, apple couldn't just send me an other keyboard, my pismo had to be send to holland!?

thankfully the key began to function again...

(the problem with the key was that I could press it down, without the computer registering it as a keystroke...)

everything considered not a good experience with my pismo so far.

also have screen marks from the keyboard.

[jmcarlin]

I experience this as well, but I have noticed it happens _only_ with Outlook/IE crashes. I never had it power off with no warning.

Yesterday, I was pulling down a lot of mail, Outlook unexpetedly quit and right after that -- no power. On reboot, it's 1904 and my keyboard function keys are reset. It's a pain.

I've actually had this happen with my Lombard as of late, and only with Explorer. Surfing along happily, and then Explorer crashes and the machine loses power -- and I've had the same '1904' problem as well. Whatever's causing this may not be exclusive to Pismo; an Explorer issue, perhaps?

[BrutoBlo]

Originally posted by jmcarlin:
I experience this as well, but I have noticed it happens _only_ with Outlook/IE crashes. I never had it power off with no warning.

Yesterday, I was pulling down a lot of mail, Outlook unexpetedly quit and right after that -- no power. On reboot, it's 1904 and my keyboard function keys are reset. It's a pain.

mmm, M$ again!!!
my no-power accident happend when I was getting mail w/ OE 5.0.2;
Imagine if we all were windoz users, what an hell...

[Misha]

A MacNN co-worker has this problem with his Pismo. All I can do is chuckle when it happens because he can't be bothered to get it fixed.

You need to send it in to Apple.

[chrogers]

Speaking of 1904, does anyone know where that date came from? Is it a.) Steve Jobs' grandmother's birthday, b.) the day his relative immigrated to the States or what?

[Misha]

1904 is the year the furthest back that a Mac clock can be set. 2039 is the furthest forward it can be set (that's right, the current Mac OS is prone to the Y2.039K bug).

Don't ask me why those numbers were chosen.

[Don Pickett]

I think 2039 is an arbitrary number, the idea being that no one will be using their Pismo in 2039.

OS X goes all the way to 2200, so watch for the Y2.201K bug.

Don

[seanyepez]

I had this problem with my Lombard when it was running on battery power. It would just die!

I'm using my new Pismo now and it never happens.

BTW, a simple fix for the problem of the pismo keyboard leaving marks on the screen is the place a glasses lense cloth over the keyboard when closing...

Just my 0.005 cents (undervalued Aussie dollar that is...)

My Pismo pulled the trick a few times lately...but as it is so unexplainable, I don't bother to ship it to Holland.

As for keys that cannot be pressed, it might be that there's some dust/crummies/junk under that exact key. That happend to me - a small piece of plastic made it down under the keys and first rendered one unusable, then another, while the first started to work again.

As for the screen - I use a "piece of cloth normally destined to dry tables with" (what the heck is that in english?), price 0,1 dollar. Color - whatever you like. Mine is (yet) pink. Advantages: I can clean my screen whenever I feel like it, I can trash it if it gets dirty, I can afford loosing it, and - I get no marks on my screen. Only bright sides here

[BrutoBlo]

OE 5.0.2 was the responsible for my bad crash?

Well, probably yes; anyway,Norton had to do a long repair session last night (PEOF errors, b-trees corruption etc);

Now it's time for Eudora, hope it's gonna be less crashy.
(I've loved Claris Emailer, but now it's really too outdated to be used "professionally")

Note: My Pismo keyboard does not touch the screen (my lombard did)

wondering what the cause of this is.
it must be a soft crash (ie. application quitting) that in someway brings the power manager down with it resulting in power off!?

any way apple should replace any units with this behaviour..

i'm giving my pismo one last chance - any problems, and i'm going for a replacement ( might even get me a 10 gig instead of this lousy 6 gig ;-)

does anybody have information about apples awareness of this problem, and what their position is on replacing/repairing the unit....?!

This sudden power-off just happened to my Pismo this week, for the first time. I have had the powerbook since early March.

I was in MS IE v5 with 3 windows open, I don't recall which site I was visiting at the time. I was connected to my ISP via the internal dialup modem and FreePPP. A system bomb error appeared on the screen, and before I could really read it the powerbook powered itself down.

Before attempting to switch it back on I disconnected the a/c adapter, removed the battery, disconnected all cables, and reset the power manager a few times. Then I brought it up on battery alone--it came up fine and DFA found no errors. I then shut down, reconnected the a/c adapter and all cables, and powered on again. It booted up fine.

After correcting the date & time (which had reverted to 1904 from the power manager reset, though perhaps from the crash initially) I ran Norton Disk Doctor on all partitions except OSX. It found only some minor file timestamp errors and corrected them.

Prior to this incident the Pismo has been extreemly reliable. There was one other time, earlier this month, that the date & time were lost upon powering up, for no apparant reason. If these remain isolated incidents I won't seek out service, only if they should happen a few times more.

i had the same problem

died more and more often

I called apple and as we went through the diagnostic it got worse and my PB died in my hands (sniff) while I was on the phone with apple.

took a full motherboard replacement - dead power management
the PB was a early production model
but I don't know if the problem had anything with the vintage


peace.

[rjenkinson]

Originally posted by chrogers:
Speaking of 1904, does anyone know where that date came from? Is it a.) Steve Jobs' grandmother's birthday, b.) the day his relative immigrated to the States or what?

the 1904 year was chosen because it meant that the mac could recognize a the date of an older user's birth (in 1984) without including the useless years before then.

-r.

[jaguarandi]

Originally posted by rjenkinson:
The 1904 year was chosen because it meant that the mac could recognize a the date of an older user's birth (in 1984) without including the useless years before then.

-r.

It was used because 1900 was not a leap year, and the Apple team wanted to calculate dates using serial numbers beginning with a leap year.
http://www.academ.com/info/macintosh/ (scroll down to 'Related Trivia')

As a side note, Microsoft Excel for Windows eventually adopted using 1904 for date calculations as an option to increase compatibiltiy with spreadsheets saved on Macintosh machines...

//e

[rjenkinson]

Originally posted by jaguarandi:
It was used because 1900 was not a leap year, and the Apple team wanted to calculate dates using serial numbers beginning with a leap year.

sure, but that begs the question about their choice of THAT leap year. why didn't they use the leap year before 1900? or the one before that? or the one before that? etc.

-r.

[Psych]

OS X goes all the way to 2200, so watch for the Y2.201K bug.
[/B]

It'll probably be 2200 before the final version comes out anyway.

[Goggles]

Well here's one for the books...? I put my Pismo to sleep this morning on a full charge, put it in its carrying case and went about my day. I did not have an opportunity to use it throughout the day. When I got home about 9 hours later, I took it out and set it up as I always do... I noticed that the sleep light was no longer flashing and that the Powerbook had actually shut down. When I turned it on and it had finished booting, it had reset itself to 1904. I haven't noticed any other ill effects but I found it strange none-the-less. This is the first time it has happened. I suspected that perhaps the battery had run down but after it had booted, the battery was still near full charge. What gives?

[Goggles]

Boy do I feel stupid!!! I discovered the problem was the battery had dislodged itself slightly thereby cutting power to the book. I don't know how or why it happened as my Powerbook was in its carrying case all day but that appears to be what happened. I pushed on the battery purely out of habit and noticed that I was able to insert it about another mm. and then I heard the click of the locking mechanism... Duhhh??!!?? Everything has been fine since and sleep mode works without a hitch...

[Potatoswatter]

sure, but that begs the question about their choice of THAT leap year. why didn't they use the leap year before 1900? or the one before that? or the one before that? etc.
also:
[B]I think 2039 is an arbitrary number, the idea being that no one will be using their Pismo in 2039.[B]

Alright. 1904 was used because it's the first leap year of this century (duh.) Going into the 19th century isn't too useful to a lot of people.

The year 2040 contains the time 2^32 seconds after the beginning of 1904 (I just verified with Graphing Calculator ). 2 to the 32 power (minus one, technically) is the highest number that a 32-bit microprocessor, like the PowerPC's and 680x0's used in Macs, can handle easily, so when Apple wrote the original time-handling code for the Mac 128K they chose to use convenient 32-bit numbers as time/date identifiers. These identifiers max out in early February 2040, so 2039 is the last entire year they can go to. This is a limitation of the MacOS and not the Pismo.

[tooki]

The date January 19, 1904 is for some reason very convenient for programmers (I know too little about programming to understand why).

Also, even current Mac OS support dates after 2040 (which is why programs such as AppleWorks and FileMaker Pro, which use Apple's time/date codes, can use any date, both before 1904 and after 2040), it is merely a limitation of the Date & Time control panel that you cannot set a date after that.

tooki

[MacAgent]

I've had the problem with the hard crash as well. It happened several times when I have OE and IE open at the same time at 7:15 AM *ONLY*! If I quit them just before and then re-open them after, I don't have the problem.

But I no longer use IE, so...

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[Richard Pinneau]

Tis good to use IE occasionally... just to make sure 9.04 remembers how to crash.
[ I actually find Sys9.04 to be incredibly stable on my Pismo - contrary to some contentions. ]
Actually, for I use IE mostly for reading MacNN forums without glasses
Gotta love that large font on those tiny pixels!

[Richard Pinneau]

Tis good to use IE occasionally... just to make sure 9.04 remembers how to crash.
[ I actually find Sys9.04 to be incredibly stable on my Pismo - contrary to some contentions. ]
Actually, for I use IE mostly for reading MacNN forums without glasses
Gotta love that large font on those tiny pixels!

My Pismo has done it once as well. Briefly flashes a error message and powered down. After that the disk was pretty messed, but Norton fixed it.

This was while surfing on the modem with IE5 and Entourage.

ho hum.

[romeosc]

My Pismo 400 was purchased in March. I haven't had any hard power off crashes as ya'll describe, but if I let it go to sleep after using IE 5. I found a work around. always quit IE and click on stickies or somrthing else...... then all's well!

[MacAgent]

Yeah, I don't use IE at all now. My main browser is Netscape 6 (With all 200,000 bugs ). Outlook Express is still the best email client though.

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