The Newton Device Reboots When Turned On

One of the Newton 2.x OS Q&As
Copyright © 1997 Newton, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Newton, Newton Technology, Newton Works, the Newton, Inc. logo, the Newton Technology logo, the Light Bulb logo and MessagePad are trademarks of Newton, Inc. and may be registered in the U.S.A. and other countries. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corp. All other trademarks and company names are the intellectual property of their respective owners.


For the most recent version of the Q&As on the World Wide Web, check the URL: http://www.newton-inc.com/dev/techinfo/qa/qa.htm
If you've copied this file locally,click here to go to the main Newton Q&A page.
This document was exported on 7/23/97.


The Newton Device Reboots When Turned On (8/9/93)

Q: My application has a really tight loop which can take more than a dozen seconds to finish. If the user turns off the Newton while my application is running, nothing happens at first, but finally the Newton turns off. The Newton device reboots when turned on. Why?

A: The reboot is happening because of a design goal. When the Newton OS learns the user wants to do a power off, the OS checks with the running application and says "Please get ready to shut down." If there is no response within about ten seconds the OS assumes that the process could be in an infinite loop. Since the user wants to turn off the Newton device, the OS terminates the application. When powering back up, there is no real clean state to return to, so the OS causes a reboot.

To work around this problem break up long processes so they can run in an viewIdleScript. In general, applications should release the CPU now and then so the OS can do clean up operations.