The click you hear is the telco relay. The flux around the driver transistor can turn conductive enough to trigger the transistor and thus the relay. I have also seen this cause reset issues and other oddities on the M100.
Jeff Birt From: M100 <m100-boun...@lists.bitchin100.com> On Behalf Of Alex ... Sent: Monday, February 6, 2023 2:39 PM To: m...@bitchin100.com Subject: Re: [M100] Low battery , crashes wipe the memory of both M102/M200 A particularly nasty crash can make it do that cold-reset thing. I ran into that countless times while trying my hand at assembly development while using ROM2 and MFORTH. in that case the problem isn't that the memory is totally erased but that some important part gets corrupted and the stock ROM starts over from scratch. I couldn't tell you for sure what or how it happens, but it can. Not necessarily the same as what you saw but I had an issue with my T102 that caused low voltages and battery drain due to the cassette remote being stuck on. The give-away for that case was if I carefully put the batteries in, I could hear the relay click on and stay on, regardless of the state of the on/off switch. It might be worth putting the machine on an ammeter and see if it's pulling some excess current if your batteries seem to not last as long as they should.
