Microwave Failure

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Hey this might not mean much to mosy of you but embededs have failed. About 6 months ago my wife bought a Panasonic 1100W High power Micrwave oven. It worked fine until about 90 days ago. It started beeping and counting up from zero to 9 then back to zero on and on and on and...at random tmes of the day but, always at the top of an hour. This was happening a couple or 3 times a day. WE just left it unplugged. Then plugged it back in when we used it. I told my wife not to return it. I suspected it was Y2K related. Well since the rollover to 2000 it has not malfunctioned. It has been plugged in since the rollover. It functions normally again. There you have it. A first hand account of what i believe is a Y2K failure . Others I'm sure own this Mwave. Can anyone tell me of a similar malfunction? the machine must have been looking 90 days a head for some reason.

-- lenny (Chmielecki@worldnet.att.net), January 05, 2000

Answers

Lenny, we are having a nearly identical problem with our General Electric microwave. It is an older model than yours, but it sets itself to 9 seconds cook time, beeps , and refuses to accept inputs from keyboard for other cook times. I can unplug it and leave it for a few minutes, then it will funtion normally for one or two cooking cycles, then revert to its constant counting to 9. Rollover has not helped it in the least. Like yours this one started malfuntioning about three months before rollover.

-- Nikoli Krushev (doomsday@y2000.com), January 05, 2000.

Intresting. Perhaps they use the same RTC/controller but the ROM in my machine being a very recent model has resolved the date error. Comments anyone?

-- lenny (Chmielecki@worldnet.att.net), January 05, 2000.

Is this a joke? Where's the punchline?

-- Servant (public_service@yahoo.com), January 05, 2000.

what don't you understand? Go back to your polly forum. whay the hell do you come here? you jerk-off!

-- lenny (Chmielecki@worldnet.att.net), January 05, 2000.

I'm no expert on embedded chips, but the whole notion that some device (especially a microwave) contains a chip that actually (and accurately) keeps track of the current date, even when the unit is unplugged, amuses me. Do all these chips have their own battery or uninterruptable power supply? I know that many microprocessing units do contain such a power supply, but if that were the case for this machine, why would you ever need to reset the time when the power goes off, and back on? How in the world would the unit possibly know that it was post Jan 1, 2000?

-- boomer (ace@ace.com), January 05, 2000.


Lenny,

My failure to report is not a microwave, but a copier. Our Xerox 5028 copier was left unplugged for the roll-over. When we came back to work and plugged it in on January 3, it is stone cold dead...not even error messages. We've checked obvious things like power, circuit breakers, etc. Suspect it's an embedded chip problem.

Has anyone else had copier problems?

-- No Polly (nopolly@hotmail.com), January 05, 2000.


lenny:

We have three microwaves in our home [I really don't want to explain why we have three boxes for reheating coffee]. All of them work fine. The newest is 10 years old. 90 days look ahead; mine aren't set up for such long term cooking.

Best wishes,,,

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), January 05, 2000.


We had a VCR decide to hang-up last night. It's an early nineties model and was running on an UPS that's larger than the one my PC is on. A Zenith 4130 simply locked-up and would not accept any commands, while the display panel still showed the current date and time. After being unplugged overnight the unit seems to be functioning properly.

Clock buffer overflow anyone?

WW

-- Wildweasel (vtmldm@epix.net), January 05, 2000.


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