Oh Dear!!

Hmmm …

Looks like I’ll combining two of my favourite subjects on this one …

But, suffice to say that — Life Saver and news hound that he is! — ComBom, of Life, Doctor Who and Combom, has managed to do a touch of investigating, and found a press release.

From the BBC.

With the transmission times of parts one and two of The End Of Time …

I believe I’m correct in assuming the usual words, in the Internet Age, is something along the lines of “Whoop, Whoop” …

Apparently …

Hopefully, these are fairly fixed.

And also — if nothing changes — means I’ll be pre-programming my dvd recorder, well ahead of time …

•••••

At any rate, some thing I do know is that — after doing a bit of digging around on Google — that I may have problems with the vintage iMac.

Not serious ones, just tricky ones to deal with.

Something I know it has trouble with, is keeping accurate time, when not connected to the Net.

In fact, having chewing it over with Movie Night Adrian – no mean streak when it comes down to computers – he thinks that inability may — in part — be the root of the restart problem it seems to be suffering, under Xubuntu 6.06. Dapper Drake.

Suffer it didn’t seemingly suffer with, under Mac OS 9.2.2.

But with both OSes, it did seem incapable of keeping accurate time, whilst offline.

Something I know others in the same shoes have had trouble with, from reading through the Ubuntu forums.

But what really got me thinking it through, was nattering with Tim, the other day, who’d been browsing through eBay, for potential Christmas presents, the other day: he’d noticed a cheap laptop on there, that was described as being in fine working order, apart from a ‘Flat CMOS Battery’.

Which meant, it seems, that the little watch battery the computer had on it’s motherboard, to power the computer’s internal clock, was dead*.

Dead …

But easily replaceable …

Which got me digging around Google, again: as I know I had to reset the PRAM — the Mac version of the relevant part of a PC motherboard — as part of installing Xubuntu on there …

What I’ve managed to find tells me that I need to find a ½ sized AA battery.

Which, after a quick walk to the local shops in the pouring rain, I’ve found come in three different voltages; shame I hadn’t thought to check on what was the right one.

Turns out, after I looked around again, it was the 3.6v …

With the result that it sounds like I’ll be posting stuff about about it, at some point; especially as it means disassembling it.

Tim, I think I’m gonna need to borrow your neighbour’s angle grinder …

* Apparently, this is a component common to all modern home computers.