Nathan's GEOS Page

Rebooting OmniGo with SRAM card

Subj:   Re: Anybody else seen this?
Date:   96-04-22 20:51:57 EDT
From:   John H. Soper
Sender: owner-ogo@lifelike.com
To:    Mike Candela
CC:     ogo@lifelike.com

From: mike candela
To: ogo@lifelike.com
Subject: Anybody else seen this?

On Mon, 22 Apr 1996 12:33:42 -0400 (EDT) you wrote:
> My Omnigo has some odd behavior that I dont understand.  As I use it over a
> 2 -4 week period the amount of memory used (what the Transfer applet shows
> for main
> memory)gradually increases until the Omnigo eventually crashes and needs
> rebooting.  I have tried terminating applications using <Fn> F3, but this seems
> to have no effect. If I do a soft reboot anytime, the memory used decreases OK
> and then starts building up again.  
> 
> On a related note, if I do a soft reboot with my SRAM card installed, the
> reboot never happens, the Omnigo just hangs, displaying the HP Startup
> Screen. In this
> state it cannot be shut off by any means except removing the batteries, and
> I usually haave to do a hard reset to get it working again
> 
> I have a 2 meg SRAM card that I bought from Notebook Supply Warehouse  (cost
> about $235) . It works great, except for the problem mentioned above.
> 
> Any ideas?

Mike -

Soon after getting a PreMax 1MB SRAM card for my OmniGo I started seeing
just this same behavior.  In addition, I started to see a much higher
incidence of 'KR-xx' internal errors requiring a soft-boot of the OmniGo.
Like you report Mike, the errors seem to occur after using many
applications over a period of time, filling up the stack & heap space.
 
Here's the steps I follow when I need to reboot with a SRAM card in the
slot:

1) Pop-out the SRAM card (if you don't, all you get is the splash-screen
   when you reboot)
2) Re-boot OG w/o SRAM card

At this point, I have never had luck with trying to put the card back in
and powering up the OG - it always locks up at the Home Screen.  So,
through trial and error, I now:

3) Remove the battery from the SRAM card
4) Set the timer on the OG for no more than 2 mins. (so I don't forget to
   put the battery back in the card)
5) After ~2 minutes, put battery back in the SRAM card
6) Power off OG & put SRAM back in
7) Turn on the OG, and after a few seconds at the Home Screen teh card is
   recognized and everything is back to normal.

Granted, this is a major workaround, so I've been in contact with HP
Mobile support since March.

At first they told me the culprit was the PreMax SRAM card and that they
use only Verbatum or MagicRAM in their OG's.  So, I returned my PreMax
card to EduCalc and bought a MagicRAM 2MB SRAM card.

Well, that didn't solve my problems one bit so I called them up again last
Thursday.  They assured me that these things shouldn't be happening and
they sent me out a replacement unit.  Well, I got the unit today and I
still can't reboot the unit with the SRAM card in it.

Called again and the nice customer support lady I spoke to said that they
have finally gotten around to fully testing the MagicRAM cards for
compatability and have found inconsistances much like what I am
experiencing.  She suggested that I get a PreMax card.  Arrrhhhhh!!!

I'm now waiting to hear back from the Tech guy that's doing the actual
testing.  [Yea, right!  I'll be waiting for a while!]

Anyone else?

john