Re: hangnail

[L Anderson lowella@xxxxxxxx]

Bruce Shapiro wrote:
>
> All:
>
> I've been a Xywrite user probably longer than some people on this list have
> been alive...and thought I knew the program pretty well. But about six
> months ago a new quirk reared its head.

Don't flatter yourself, old man! :-)

>
> I currently run Xy4-Dos on an oldish W95 machine. For no apparent reason,
> whenever I go to TYpe a file using either of my two parallel printers (an
> HP officejet and an Apple postscript laserwriter) the scary error message
> GENERAL FAILURE has started appearing on the command line. The thing is,
> there's no apparent actual error, printing proceeds as normal and
> everything continues to run without difficulty.
>

Perhaps this is a Private matter and I'll probably get worded Corporal
punishment from the list's Sergeant at Arms, his various Lieutenants, or
sundry Captains of the publishing industry on the list that still use
Xywrite. Regardless, I'll make a Major effort to help you get to the
Colonel of your problem and give you my 2 cents worth on GENERAL
FAILURE.

Having said that, if I were you, I would first suspect a disk drive (or
possibly the disk controller) before either of the printers. Especially
since I infer from what you wrote, the problem happens with either
printer. I'd recommend you backup your stuff then run scandisk to clean
up any lost or cross-linked clusters. You could also run a surface
analysis if your version of scandisk supports that or you have other
utilities (Norton) that do. I would also check for virii.
Michaelangelo comes to mind as a virus that would disable floppy drives
and result in the system saluting General Failure.   

> This is not life or death but it's certainly aggravating -- the Xywrite
> equivalent of a hangnail. Any diagnosis from the Xy-physicians' guild?
>

If it's your disk drive(s) your hangnail may turn into an amputation.

Good luck,

Lowell Anderson