Registered: Mar 2000
Location: Garland, TX, USA
Posts: 108

Visor on its deathbed?

Man, when you need technology to work, it fails you! At least that's what I discovered last Wednesday.

I was on the way to the airport to go to my sister's wedding. I had an accident on the road, but thank goodness I have my Visor and Visorphone with me! There I am stranded on the side of the road, and my Visor won't turn on. I had used it not more than 2 hours prior. I switched the batteries and sure enough it came on with the PalmOS boot screen. Thank goodness I used the backup module that morning!

I assumed that I must have let the batteries get too low though I was certain that they were at about 97%. The Visor never booted, but stayed in that reset cycle. I've seen this before, so I left the batteries out for about 20 minutes. This time, the boot screen gave me that blinking cursor in the uppper right of the screen.

So I catch a cab to the airport. In the terminal, I play more with the Visor. By now, the batteries have been out a full hour and a half. I thought for sure it's going to come up now. Same thing -- the blinking cursor.

I tried multiple resets, and occassionally got the stylus calibration screen but then a Fatal Exception would pop up. Twice I've gotten this screen:
MemoryMgrNew.c
Line 4183, Invalid chunk ptr

Just today, I tried a different pair of fresh batteries and it came up. I was even able to restore from the Bakup Module all the data, but it's still giving me random Fatal Exceptions. What's the DRAM issue all about? Is this it?

__________________
Cheers,
Rob Lund
The Rob Pages
[email protected]

Registered: Jul 2000
Location:
Posts: 3034

It could be the DRAM bug. If you purchased your Visor Deluxe around the time you show up as registering here, there's a very good chance you have it. Basically, it had to do with a certain model DRAM controller not always refreshing the DRAM properly when it was in 'self-refresh' mode.

Here are the various manufacturers' takes on the issue:
Palm
Handspring
TRG/Handera (the best description, incidentally)

Basically the patch modifies how your Visor refreshes the DRAM (which is where your add-on apps and data reside). As a consequence, you'll see a slight battery hit if you're a casual user. It's less noticeable if you use it a lot. I used to have a link to a Usenet post which calculated the potential loss, but it's long gone.