| Friday,
December 28, 2001 One of the problems
with getting older is that you forget things. I don't mean Alzheimer's. I
think I know who I am. And I think I am as smart as I used to be although
a LOT slower. But I can't work on but one thing at a time, and if I
stop working on something I need to document what I have done, what
is needed to do, and put it all together in one place: just dropping a
project and starting something else, then trying to come back to what I
was doing doesn't work. Or doesn't always work.
It's something I used to be able to do, and I can't do it any more.
Case in point. We need to get Q&A working on any machine here at
Chaos Manor. All attempts have failed. I know that readers have
given me some advice, such as that there are problems with having too much
memory or too large a disk space. There is supposed to be a version that
doesn't have that problem. One reader, and to my shame I don't recall who,
even sent a CD that supposedly had that version on it. Naturally I do not
know where I put that disk, since I didn't start a project box for
Q&A.
It is getting urgent to have it running here, and I don't have any idea
of how to do it: it is as if all the work I had done in trying to get it
going had never been done, and I don't even recall where the daylights I
put anything having to do with it.
This is not good, and I am chagrined, but there isn't a lot I can do
other than confess that the good advice I got earlier isn't locatable, nor
is the disk that was sent with a version that works, and I would sure
appreciate help here. We have one Windows 95 system, three Windows 98
systems, several Windows 2000 systems, and one each Windows XP Home and
Windows XP Professional. All have large hard drives and lots of
memory. In every case just trying to run Q&A gets an "illegal
instruction" error. I am fairly sure I have managed to get to the
point where there is an attempt to load the file, and it goes
"loading, loading" endlessly, but now I can't even get there.
In future I will have to take notes. If I have to build a DOS machine
and install this stuff on it I will, but I'd prefer not to get that
drastic. Can anyone help?
I have done a search on my own site and found this:
3. Mail
171 September 17 - 23, 2001 ••
CHAOS MANOR MAIL Mail 171 September 17 - 23, 2001 HOME
VIEW MAIL Columns BOOK Reviews CLICK ON THE BLIMP TO SEND MAIL TO ME LAST
WEEK Current Mail NEXT ...
... You're welcome, but I fear that the symptom you described:
"...run the old Q&A program. At the moment
it attempts to load but never finishes loading" ...
... Which version of Q&A are you
trying to install? The installation program may not run well on a fast
machine. (Read that as any machine bought in the ...
... All the Q&A links you are likely
to need are at http://www.qaug.com Good luck. Mark Hartwell I did copy
from a machine where it worked: a Pentium 200. ...
57% Tue, 25 Sep 2001 13:49:19 GMT http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail171.html
But in fact that seems a bit confusing, with advice on slowing down
machines, and other stuff. I am sure I can manage to fathom it, but what I
would really like is for someone who knows all about this to just tell me
how they got it running.
Then there are version problems. We most have Q&A installed on
various hard drives. I may or may not have the original installation
floppies: another case of a long search through Chaos Manor.
This time I intend to keep at this until I get it done. Any help
appreciated.
That didn't take long. Thanks: I now have links
to about 20 places, and Eric thinks he has seen at least one copy working
on one of Niven's machines. (Turns out Roland set that up before he moved
up north.)
I ought to have it all working in a few days.
Thanks to Bob Thompson, Eric Pobirs, Roland Dobbins, and all the others
who responded so quickly. The simplest thing is to find a copy of it
working somewhere and copy the entire directory since Q&A didn't as I
recall go outside its own directory for DLL's and such.
Another possibility is a patch from johntdow.com;
he wants $50 for it, which I would be willing to pay if I were sure it
would work. He says it won't work with Q&A 4, which is what our
various boxes say we have. I don't know if I ever got version 5, or
Q&A for Windows. Since you have to get it running to determine what
version it is, and if I had it running I wouldn't need the patch, I
suspect $50 is a bit much to fling out into the aether.
One way or another I intend to get this
running.
And for a long but very insightful piece about Johnny Walker
http://www.andrewsullivan.com/text/main_articletext1.html?print
is worth your attention.
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