Unfreezing the HP Prime?

[Alasdair McAndrew]

I have been putting my new HP Prime through its paces. I'd like to like this calculator - I really would - but it's so damned fragile. There have been far too many spontaneous reboots and freezes for my liking. (I've never had such problems with either the TI-nspire, or the Casio ClassPad).

I was experimenting with some higher derivatives, and entered

diff(ln(1+x^2),x,14)

which has resulted in a freeze. I learned some time back that pressing the "On" and "Symb" buttons together could unfreeze the machine, but now they won't. It's just stuck.

How can I safely unfreeze - force a hard reboot of - the calculator?

Thanks!

[Alasdair McAndrew]

What I did in the end was to unscrew the back plate, and temporarily removed the battery. But surely there must be an easier way.

[Ralf Fritzsch]

A paperclip reset, perhaps?

BTW, already two times this was the only way for me to get the HP Prime switched on at all!

Edited: 16 Nov 2013, 4:03 a.m.

[Michael de Estrada]

Yes, if the keyboard is frozen, this is the only way to restart the calculator and regain control. Eventually, however, the calculator will become chronically unstable, such that the only way to restore functionality is to reformat the flash drive. This has happened to mine several times, and resulted in total loss of saved programs and data.

Edited: 16 Nov 2013, 11:13 a.m.

[Tim Wessman]

There are plenty of people not experiencing this. While I do not doubt you at all, I wish I could understand what particularly you are doing that keeps triggering these types of issues.

TW

[Ralf Fritzsch]

Nothing special is needed to trigger this issues. Once in Home I simply wanted to calculate in textbook mode (10-7.57)/0.09 - and bang! There materialized from nowhere some Japanese or Chinese symbols, and at the next try nothing after the dot was accepted by the input parser, when trying to enter 0.09 of the denominator., thus always resulting in a div by zero. Only a paperclip reset helped.

I haven't yet entered any program, nor did I input any special things, only very basic kinds of arithmetics, or simple CAS tasks. Anyway, with near full batteries, the HP Prime twice could not be switched on, other than by paperclip reset. Why, for God's sake, is this so? I have some advanced HP calculators (12, 15, 19, 28, 32, 32ii, 35, 48, 49, 50), and also some TI's (58, 59, 86, 89, 92+), but no one of them is that much buggy like the HP Prime with it's actual Firmware.

Kind regards, Ralf.

Edited: 16 Nov 2013, 11:53 a.m.

[Michael de Estrada]

Sometimes, all I'm doing is navigating a menu with the arrow wheel. It will either freeze, reboot or leave a frozen phantom image that can only be removed with a reset. Sometimes keys turn mysteriously into hard reset buttons. For a while, I would be in the program editor, and when I hit Esc it would reboot/reset, such that all the work I had done in the editor would not get saved. As to what I'm doing, I'm just trying to use the calculator normally.

[Marcus von Cube, Germany]

You might have faulty hardware.

[Alasdair McAndrew]

Here's how my calculator froze right now: chose "Statistics 1 Var" from the Apps menu; opened up the Home view and checked out the menus. Result (for no reason): freeze. I managed to unfreeze this time with On+Symb.