Re: hangnail

[Bruce Shapiro bruce.shapiro@xxxxxxxx]

Thanks, all.

My salute from "General failure." is indeed a hardware issue, I think. My
floppy drive expired months ago, but working in the age of zipdrive I use
it so seldom that I haven't bothered doing anything about it.

BS


At 11:58 PM 1/5/01 -0500, you wrote:
>** Reply to note from Bruce Shapiro  on Fri,
>05 Jan 2001 16:32:43 -0500
>
>> 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.
>
>Is it really a XyWrite error, or an error from DOS bleeding through
>at the top of the screen (where your cursor would be if you shelled to
>DOS). I see this often when I'm fooling around -- not "General
>Failure" (a scary guy, I agree), but other DOS errors, appearing on
>lines 2 or 3 of the screen. One way to find out (if it really happens
>"whenever" you TYpe a file) would be to command TYF, which would
>generate the printer output but not send it to the print queue -- not,
>in short, send it outside the XyWrite closed system. If you DON'T get
>the error when TYFing, then I suspect that something is going on in
>the dangerous and lawless world outside, prompting this militant
>response. Another way to check this is -- immediately after this
>happens, hitting *no key* that could trigger a program or access the
>Help system or incur any other error -- go to the CMline, issue VA/NV
>$ER and see if it returns error #205, which is spelt -- and will ONLY
>be displayed when an error occurs as -- "General failure." <==exactly
>like that, including the casing, not "GENERAL FAILURE" as you've
>written. (There is no $tring "GENERAL FAILURE" in Editor.) Now, that
>is not to say that Editor couldn't do something that causes DOS to
>react with such ferocity. You may have a corrupt Editor, in which
>case, trade it in for a fresh copy (which version are you running? be
>sure it's v4.018. up near the top of the XyWWWeb page there's a link
>to it, under "Software Requirements..." para 1).
>
>Did you upgrade your Virus95 printer subsystem six months ago? One
>of the biggest problems with the SmallLimp way of interacting with
>users is that you are always kept in the dark; they say "push this
>button to upgrade", but you haven't a clue what they're actually doing
>or replacing. They thrive on user ignorance.
>
>----------
>Robert Holmgren
>holmgren@xxxxxxxx
>----------
>