Why Did I Have to Re-Set My Parameter RAM

Today while using Airport wireless, for an unknown reason my connection was terminated even tho my Airport wireless continued to work (self assigned IP address).
I have also a D**l laptop which continued to receive my wireless router and was not affected whatsoever.
With assistance from Apple phone tech, I was able to once again to connect to my wireless router and rejoin the internet.....after re-setting the 'parameter ram'.
What would be typical (if any) causes of this problem (or others) which would require re-set of the parameter ram?

Pram is a cache of several system environment variables. It's function can be similar to a bios chip on a PC motherboard and it can speedup boot times.
Apple discusses it here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1242
Now that article says that network information is not stored in the Pram, but there's always a chance that the Pram data can become corrupted by a kernel panic, power outage or other surprise. This corruption could interfere with other devices on a system.
I Zap the Pram on machines that seem to be having problems finding their boot drives or other strange startup/hardware problems.
I don't think I would have thought of it for a wireless problem, but why not? It's painless and fixes a slew of issues.

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Why did I have to enter IP address manually

I could use a little help. I have an Airport Extreme 802.11n and a Motorola modem for connecting to Comcast. I also have two Macs and an iPhone.
All of this was working fine up until very early this morning. And then it just stopped working. After trying everything else I could think of, I finally connected my MacBook Pro directly to the modem using an Ethernet cable. And that worked fine. But I noticed that the "automated" Comcast DHCP information was different than the supposedly automated data on my Airport Extreme.
So I reconnected my Airport Extreme router and entered the information manually under the "Internet" tab. This information I entered includes:
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- Subnet Mask
- Router Address
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But I'm puzzled. Why did my Airport Extreme not obtain and use the proper Comcast addresses when I had it set to "Configure IPv4: Using DHCP" … even when I powered down both the modem and the router, and restarted???
Can anyone suggest a fix for my problem?
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William:
Thanks for your interest in this. Here are some more details. When my Internet connection stopped working yesterday I reviewed my Airport Extreme (Gigabit) "Internet" settings using the Airport Utility. Everything looked OK. I was using "Configure IPv4 Using DCHP." The AE had a green light, and the various settings from Comcast were all populated ... and I noticed that all of the Comcast IP addresses (including the router and DNS servers all started with "68."
Then I disconnected my AE unit from the Motorola modem, and connected my MacBook Pro directly to the modem using Ethernet. And it worked! I could access the Internet. I then looked at my MBP "Internet" settings in the Network section of System Prefs. Again I was using "Configure IPv4 Using DCHP," but I noticed that the IP addresses being served up by Comcast were different. Both my IP address and the Comcast Router address started with "71." (and not "68.").
So I copied all of the TCP/IP settings from the Network Prefs panel on my MacBook Pro, and entered them manually into my AE. And then my Internet connection worked just fine. It's still working some 20 hours later, and I'm still using the manual TCP/IP setup on my AE.
But I'm concerned that my AE was not picking up the correct TCP/IP settings from Comcast via DHCP. I would like to go back to using DHCP, but I would like to know what went wrong yesterday before I do.
Regards,
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Why did I have a kernel panic?

I was in the process of disconnecting my Nikon D40 (a procedure I have done many times without incident). Usually I shut the camera off and pull out the USB connector once the volume disappears from my desktop, with no problem. This time, as soon as I shut off the camera, I got a strange "You must restart your computer" message I'd never seen before (I've had the computer almost 3 years). Discovered this was a "kernel panic" message.
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Here is the message from panic.log:
Wed Dec 31 13:57:16 2008
panic(cpu 0 caller 0x001A4A55): Unresolved kernel trap (CPU 0, Type 14=page fault), registers:
CR0: 0x8001003b, CR2: 0x0000001e, CR3: 0x00d99000, CR4: 0x000006e0
EAX: 0x00000000, EBX: 0x0311ec00, ECX: 0x0039a412, EDX: 0x01f06520
CR2: 0x0000001e, EBP: 0x0b8b3d58, ESI: 0xe00002ed, EDI: 0x02017e00
EFL: 0x00010202, EIP: 0x1fbd8654, CS: 0x00000008, DS: 0x00000010
Backtrace, Format - Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack)
0xb8b3b88 : 0x128d08 (0x3cc0a4 0xb8b3bac 0x131de5 0x0)
0xb8b3bc8 : 0x1a4a55 (0x3d24b8 0x0 0xe 0x3d1cdc)
0xb8b3cd8 : 0x19aeb4 (0xb8b3ce8 0x0 0xe 0x390048)
0xb8b3d58 : 0x538d3c (0x311ec00 0xe00002ed 0xe00002ed 0x1f)
0xb8b3db8 : 0x8ed0e0 (0x1f5e000 0x2017e00 0xe00002ed 0x1f)
0xb8b3e68 : 0x8eda23 (0x1f5e000 0x30a2918 0x0 0x0)
0xb8b3ec8 : 0x8eda77 (0x1f5e000 0x0 0x0 0x1fbd254)
0xb8b3ee8 : 0x8e68d4 (0x1f5e000 0x0 0xb8b3f58 0x1fbd238)
0xb8b3f08 : 0x39b3c3 (0x1f5e000 0x0 0x1 0x38169e)
0xb8b3f58 : 0x39a595 (0x1fa8600 0x0 0x0 0x19e23a)
0xb8b3f88 : 0x39a2cb (0x1fc03c0 0xb8b3fd4 0x134c09 0x135eb4)
0xb8b3fc8 : 0x19ad2c (0x1fc03c0 0x0 0x19e0b5 0x2837458) Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0x0
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.driver.AppleUSBEHCI(2.7.5)@0x8e3000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOUSBFamily(2.7.5)@0x534000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.2)@0x59c000
com.apple.iokit.IOUSBFamily(2.7.5)@0x534000
Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 8.10.1: Wed May 23 16:33:00 PDT 2007; root:xnu-792.22.5~1/RELEASE_I386
Message was edited by: ebedgert

Perhaps try it again and see if it was just a bad alignment of the planets last time. You could also post more of the log to see which thread it was that actually crashed and what was happening. In the meantime this will keep you busy:
[I got a black screen telling me I had to reboot in many languages, what was it?|http://www.dslreports.com/faq/4970] Also has detailed description of what happens during a KP.
[Apple docs: What's a kernel panic? (Mac OS X)|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106227]
[Topic : kmosx: Kernel Panics? Don't panic too !|http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=121923]
[X-Lab: Resolving Kernel Panics|http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/kernelpanics.html]
[Tutorial: Avoiding and eliminating Kernel panics|http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20060911080447777]
[Tutorial: An introduction to reading Mac OS X crash reports|http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20060309075929717]
[12-Step Program to Isolate Freezes and/or Kernel Panics|http://macosg.com/group/viewtopic.php?t=800]
[Texas Mac Man's post on kernel panics|http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1723768&tstart=0]

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All, thank you for your time and valuable information. I am relieved that nothing is wrong with my system, but I must say that I find it is a little odd that a user has to do take these steps after making hardware or software changes to the system. I would expect this to be done as part of the install routines. Perhaps that is why other (you know who) systems need rebooting after most hardware or software changes.
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Spinning Beachball of Death . . . why did I have to Force Quit ???

Folks:
Last week I had an episode of multiple recurring "application not
responding" errors while trying to select and scroll down through a couple
hundred pages of text in a manuscript of approx. 1.8 MB in size in my word processor, Mellel. As I scrolled down about half way the spinning beachball started spinning and the scrolling process became slow, sluggish, and then unresponsive . . . . I force quit and repeated another 2x to no different response. Finally did "select all" to whole doc and then had to go in to the few pages that I had originally not wanted to select and change them to back to what I wanted . . . a little bit "bassakwards" but I got it done the old fashioned way. Now, when I attempt to "save edits" as I'm going thru my doc the beachball will spin for different periods of time. This is mostly an all text doc with just two (2) photos that have been "inserted" into the doc--seems like the photo's are smaller files than the original, and about 250 pp.
So, the question is is mr Mel (Mellel) trying to tell me something about my system; is this perchance a sign that Macinto II (the 2nd HD in the iBook) is coming close to its ultimate demise? A few years back I began having "issues" with mr Mel that eventually were shown to be signs of the end of Macinto I (named after the famous Seminole Indian chief who fought the US Army to a draw in the Everglades). I had just run the Apple Hardware test just a few days before this
recent episode all happened and it seemed to be OK. But it has been mentioned
here that mr Mel is "processor intensive" and could be just testing the limits
of my 2nd HD??? OR is the test over and all that is left is the funeral pyre for
Macinto II??
Would essentially a 2MB Mellel file be too large for my 933 MHz G4 iBook
with 640 MB DDR SDRAM running Mellel 2.2.7 (build b9) on 10.4.11 . . . to handle
even if it was totally in fighting condition?? Or is the probably 3 year old HD
being brought to expiration by having to deal with running the features that are
brought to the table by mr Mel??
Thanks for any thoughts,
eep

Word processors typically load a large portion of a file into RAM for editing. When more of the document is needed it pages out the unneeded portion and reads more of the document into RAM. So in practice no document is too large. None of your "surmises" would seem to make sense.
A more likely scenario is disk corruption or file corruption assuming the hard drive isn't failing. Continued forced shutdown of the computer is a sure fire way to corrupt a hard drive if not cause it fatal damage.
I suggest reading the following:
Kappy's Personal Suggestions for OS X Maintenance
For disk repairs use Disk Utility. For situations DU cannot handle the best third-party utilities are: Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.x is now Intel Mac compatible. TechTool Pro provides additional repair options including file repair and recovery, system diagnostics, and disk defragmentation. TechTool Pro 4.5.1 or higher are Intel Mac compatible; Drive Genius is similar to TechTool Pro in terms of the various repair services provided. Versions 1.5.1 or later are Intel Mac compatible.
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep. Dependence upon third-party utilities to run the periodic maintenance scripts had been significantly reduced in Tiger and Leopard.
OS X automatically defrags files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems.
I would also recommend downloading the shareware utility TinkerTool System that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old logfiles and archives, clearing caches, etc.
For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the commandline. Note that AppleJack 1.5 is required for Leopard.
When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. Carbon Copy Cloner (Donationware)
6. SuperDuper! (Commercial)
7. Intego Personal Backup (Commercial)
8. Data Backup (Commercial)
9. SilverKeeper 2.0 (Freeware)
10. MimMac (Commercial)
11. CloneTool Hatchery (Shareware)
12. Clone X (Commercial)
The following utilities can also be used for backup, but cannot create bootable clones:
1. Backup (requires a .Mac account with Apple both to get the software and to use it.)
2. Toast
3. Impression
4. arRSync
Apple's Backup is a full backup tool capable of also backing up across multiple media such as CD/DVD. However, it cannot create bootable backups. It is primarily an "archiving" utility as are the other two.
Impression and Toast are disk image based backups, only. Particularly useful if you need to backup to CD/DVD across multiple media.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.
Additional suggestions will be found in Mac Maintenance Quick Assist.
Referenced software can be found at www.versiontracker.com and www.macupdate.com.

Why Did I Have to Re-Set My Parameter RAM

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