🚀 go-pugleaf

Recently, my A3000 has developed a strange (and pretty annoying) habit
of crashing. There is a pattern in it. At first, the crashes are not
very serious. Sometimes only an application dies, or else a reset with
Ctrl-Break is enough to get the machine running again. After a while,
Ctrl-Break does nothing, and I have to use the hard reset button. The
crashes get more and more serious, until not a power-on boot (with
Delete pressed) fails to get the @#$@%&* thing working. No screen
output, no nothing. At this point, the only solution is to take off the
cover, remove the IDE interface, switch the machine on and off, and
reassemble the whole thing. After that, all seems well until the
pattern starts all over again.

Can anybody make an educated guess about the cause of this annoyance? I
don't think it's caused by the software. It doesn't matter what is
running, and the crash behaviour seems random (I've seen all kinds:
abort on instruction fetch, continuous sound, messed up screen, total
lack of response). Nor could it be caused by heat building up inside:
the thing may crash a few seconds after starting up. Bad contacts in
the expansion slot, messing up the bus is a possibility, but that would
hardly explain why the crashes get more and more serious.

My guess would be that the backup battery of the C-mos RAM is getting
old. Is there a way to check this (e.g. by measuring its voltage)?

Any help appreciated.


Dick Alstein