[Ham-Mac] G4 Battery Test

Wed, 3 Sep 2003 11:46:14 -0400

At 11:29 -0500 09_01_2003, Richard Kriss wrote:
>
>My G4-450 AGP has been dropping it time/date. I suspected a bad battery so I
>pulled it and it still reads about 3.6 volts.  How do  you know if the
>battery is good or bad?  It was replaced last year.
>
>This is getting to be a PIA as I was have the time/date synced to Apple via
>the network and my dialup connection keeps dropping out and OSX fails to get
>an update and goes crazy.

What version of Mac OS X? Mac OS X 10.2.4 had a date/time issue big 
time, as reported at MacFixit:

"Apple addresses Mac OS X 10.2.4 date bug with Knowledge Base article

"Apple has addressed officially acknowledged Mac OS X 10.2.4 date 
bug, which was reported and worked around ,

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20030224074232532

  previously on MacFixIt.

"After updating to Mac OS X 10.2.4, some systems constantly reset 
themselves to the date "Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 EST 1969" after being 
restarted. It now appears - based on a compilation of more than 2 
dozen reader reports - that the problem occurs mostly on Power Mac G4 
dual processor systems (a handful of users report the problem with 
other models), including the 2003 Power Mac G4 (FireWire 800) models 
- which include a modified version of Mac OS X 10.2.3. The problem 
also only occurs you shut the Mac down completely. Restarting does 
not usually cause the date to reset.

"The Apple Knowledge Base article, #25374 ,

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25374

offers the sole workaround of using a network time server (which does 
not work for dial-up Internet connection users and was previously 
noted here ).

"Other workarounds posted on MacFixIt include using Apple's CHUD 
Tools and the small utility iTime 1.0. "

The best solution is the one suggested by Apple in the article, which 
is to upgrade to the latest version of Mac OS X (now version 10.2.6).

I never saw this problem with 10.2.4, because I have a broadband 
connection and the Network Time update continuously running, so if 
the time was wrong, it was automatically corrected. Those with dialup 
connections are the ones that were affected the worse by this bug.

Hope this helps.

73,
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