Mac SE, OS7.1; dates not displaying properly.

[PeteWeedon]

I have been checking over a Mac SE4/20 which I acquired second-hand. It's still got the original 800K floppy drive and has System 7.1 installed.

When I set View to show a folder by Name, by Type, by Date etc, the 'Last Modified' dates are not displayed properly, it just shows a comma followed by the time.

In 'Date Format' in the Date & Time control panel, the short date format behaves OK but the long format does not. The boxes against the Month, Day, Day of Week and Year each contain several gobbledegook characters rather than commas and British/US and Custom format selection misbehaves.

The machine also has 'SuperClock' and 'Open-Wide' but temporarily removing them from the control panels folder and re-booting doesn't fix the problem. Neither does booting with extensions off.

I've tried removing 'Date & Time', ver 7.1 and replacing it with 'Date & Time', ver 7.5, lifted from another Mac but that didn't help either. Nor did rebuilding the desk-top.

I don't have System 7.1 on 800K diskettes so I can't re-install. I do have System 7.5.3 but that's on 1.4Mb diskettes so I can't easily upgrade the OS.

Please, has anyone else seen this problem?

Does anyone have any suggestions to offer regarding further diagnosis or a cure?

Please don't say 'Scrap the SE', I'm getting it ready to give to a friend who particularly wants a compact all-in-one Mac.


Best regards,

Pete W.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs - you haven't seen the latest Change Note!

 

[jimoblak]

Could the dates be askew because the Mac cannot tell time anymore? This is an old Mac that may have a dead or flaky battery.

One of the tricks of Norton Utilities is to fix bad timestamps on files. It would help if you had a copy.

- - picklefish - -
Why is everyone in this forum responding to me as picklefish?

 

[PeteWeedon]

Jimoblak:

Good suggestions, thanks. I did have the lid off to reset the raster size but forgot to look at the battery. Silly me! I have already delivered the SE4/20 to my friend, I'll have to make a follow-up call.

I understand that early SEs (such as my own original model) have wired-in batteries but that more recent models employ a 1/2_AA size battery in a holder (as also used in some LCs and Performas). I'd planned that when my own SE's (wired-in) battery finally expired, I would fit a battery holder. I don't know of any source of the battery holder in the electronic component market but I have a semi-derelict LC I on the shelf; I planned to take the battery holder from that.

The SE4/20 was keeping good time as displayed in the menu bar by SuperClock and also in the Date & Time control panel though. I guess I took this as evidence that the battery was OK.

If I understand the matter properly, the Mac's internal clock counts seconds since some arbitrary starting time chosen by the designers to facilitate calculating the day of the week and date. That number of seconds is converted by Window Manager (one of the components of the Toolkit ROM. Is this correct?

I do have an early version of Nortons; I'll give it some exercise to refresh my fluency with it.

Thanks again, Jim.

No disrespect to Jimoblak but has anyone else any offerings? The more the merrier.


Best regards,

Pete W.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs - you haven't seen the latest Change Note!