Startup Freeze

Startup Freeze: Occasionally, I've had a freeze on my PowerBase 180 during startup after the Finder with the menu bar is displayed with the mouse pointer in the upper left corner of the screen. Last weekend after a crash during a PowerMerge backup, the freeze became persistent.

Since the freeze did not occur when all extensions were turned off, I tried without success to isolate a conflict. I replaced the mouse and keyboard, rebuilt the desktop file and zapped PRAM--nothing fixed the freeze problem. Then, I replaced the Mac OS 7.6 Finder and System file and that worked for several restarts and cold boots but the freeze returned. I finally re-installed Mac OS 7.6.1 and the problem was resolved--no more mouse-pointer startup freezes. At this point, I haven't a clue why re-installing Mac OS 7.6.1 (I had gone back to 7.6 because of the startup delay problems with 7.6.1) worked but I thought this observation may help someone else with this problem.

Of course, Mac OS 7.6.1 with the L2 Cache Reset extension caused a 20-second delay during startup, restart and shutdown as I first reported previously. However, re-selecting the hard drive as the Startup Disk and turning off Virtual Memory and RAM Doubler as noted on MacFixIt (5/28) eliminated the 20-second delay. This, in turn, created another problem. The system's use of RAM bloated by some 3-5 MB. It appears to be a Hobbs choice--freeze, delay or RAM-bloat--I've chosen the delay and eagerly await Mac OS 8.

David Slik's e-mail to me announced the MacOS Compatible PCI Product Directory. It has over 250 PCI cards listed in addition to PowerBook 3400 PC card and expansion bay devices.