SE Issue

[Mr. 680x0]

For around 23 seconds when I turn it on, it displays white diagonal lines on the screen, then proceeds to boot. The lines go from the top left to the bottom right. They are one pixel wide, with a two pixel wide black line between all of them.

Any way to fix this? Once it starts to boot, it's up in 7 seconds.

 

[The Macster]

Now that you mention it, there is something similar on my Plus. I've never really thought of it as a problem as such, I just assumed it was normal, or if not that it isn’t really an issue anyway. Basically you get a screen that is slightly different to the grey normal background that the Happy Mac appears on (I think it is diagonally-striped, like you say) for a little while (not sure how long exactly), and then the flashing disk symbol (now on the normal background) telling you to insert a boot disk appears.

I wouldn't think there's any way to fix it, if it is a fault - things like this are normally caused by dodgy capacitors on these old Compacts.

 

[Scott Baret]

I bet you have 4MB of RAM. This pattern appears during the RAM test and stays for a longer time if you have more RAM.

 

[Mr. 680x0]

Yes, I have the full 4MB of RAM in it. I thought it was just the RAM test.

 

[The Macster]

Ah I see - glad it's not a problem then Capacitor death is sadly usually terminal, and strange screen artifacts at startup can indicate it (although usually the machine doesn't continue starting up after displaying them). Why does the memory test take so long? Mine only has 2.5 MB of Ram.

 

[Scott Baret]

Even with 2.5MB of RAM, it's going to be slow. The RAM in a Plus/SE isn't the fastest in the world so it's not going to test 4MB in a few seconds like a modern machine. Try testing it against a 1MB Mac, they take a lot less time.

The lines caused by a capacitor failure will look a lot different than that--think along the lines of really thick vertical white bars, checkerboard patterns, etc. These patterns seem especially common on Classic II's. These lines are strange, not the nice uniform pattern you are observing.

If you think a 2.5MB SE takes forever to test RAM, try a 1MB Lisa or a Toshiba T1200 with 640K. Both of these take well over a minute!

 

[tomlee59]

If, like me, you don't like waiting for the ram test to finish, you can bypass it. On power up, press and hold down the mouse button. Then it will go directly into the boot sequence.