Survey posted 2004-10-12 07:16 by Morgan.

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The only accidental TI-OS crash I remember encountering was many years ago on the TI-82. I was drawing something (I think a calendar) on the graph screen for fun, and then when I tried to exit to the Home Screen, the calculator simply froze. No display glitches, nothing spectacular, just frozen. After a day passed and the calculator still hadn't shut off (and was draining the batteries very rapidly), I had to finally take out the batteries and lose my RAM (and all my BASIC programs). That happened before I had a calc-computer link cable (much less a computer) and before I had heard of ASM, so that was a big deal to me at the time.

For a while, my TI-89 had been crashing quite often. This was partly due to ASM programs, and partly due to the batteries somehow running down before the low battery message got triggered (took me a while to figure that one out--seems to happen often with rechargeable batteries). Now, I haven't had any problems in a long time (I test the batteries every once in a while, and haven't run many ASM programs for some time).

All the other crashes I remember were either done on purpose (taking advantage of ROM bugs) just for fun, or by ASM programs. The ASM crashes have taught me to make a serious habit of backing up my data on a very regular basis.

This might be an interesting question--which crashes more often, your computer or your calculator?

System crashes on my computer are infrequent, but I encounter a lot of software crashes (often one or more per day).

It's hard to make that separation on the calculator, because generally when an ASM program crashes, the whole system basically crashes, too. (Kind of like DOS, I guess.)

Overall, I'd say from experience that TI-OS by itself is very stable, and TI's programmers did a good job. Unfortunately, many third-party ASM programs aren't as stable.

When I'm running Windows, my computer crashes more often than my calculator, hands down.

When I'm running GNU/Linux (Knoppix), my calculator crashes more often than my computer, and my calculator doesn't crash hardly at all (mostly because I don't use it much).

makes perfect sense, but u use knoppix?

Yeah, I'm running Knoppix just from CD. It's a nice distro.

Every once in awhile, or when I shut it down, I save my settings (the knoppix home directory) to the hard drive. When I start it back up I run a little script to configure the system to how I like it and to restore my settings to how I left them.

I haven't installed it because I'm too lazy and it's just my parent's computer. I have Slackware on my own computer, though, with an uptime of 53 days and counting. :)

I'm running Mac OS X over here. I get application crashes every day, but I haven't had a total system crash in over 8 months. I have had two freezes on the login screen that forced a hard restart - both times it happened after trashing my user preferences. While I can't crash my Mac on demand, I can do that to my calc. So I guess my calc crashes more than my computer does. (This is for my primary computer - I also have a Windows machine, but it spends most of its time off.)

I would have to say my calculator. My home machine runs windows, and before I turned it off to go to a LAN party, was running for 23 days straight without restart or being turned off. My calculator almost never crashes, but it does occasionally (trying to run mirage programs from CrunchyOS that use unsupported rom calls).

I've found that Windows is one of the most stable OS's installed on a computer. It's not very stable when it _runs_, though. :-P

My computer crashes easily 15 times a week with windows 98. I have 256mg of ram, a 733mhz off-brand processor, Ram Medic (I use it often), and even playing Age Of the Empires II CE for about 2 hrs will slow it down!

My TI-83+ on the other hand, crashes at about tops once a week with regular usage of asm programs.

I fairly recently started using a computer with SuSE Linux 9.1, so it's a bit too early to say whether it or my calculator crashes more often.

When I was trying to get the computer set up and sort out a few problems, I was having problems and had quite a few reboots (apparently certain buggy system configuration programs that have to run as root can easily lock the system up so that not even SysRq key sequences work), but things have wound down and it seems pretty stable.

Recently, the only reboots were for shutting the system down and unplugging it during occasional thunderstorms to protect it from power surges, and on some occasions where I've done something really stupid [like trying to figure out if SysRq key sequences worked by pressing a bunch of random combinations and then accidentally hitting the power-off-immediately-without-going- through-shutdown-routine key combo. Yep, SysRq works all right... :-) ]

Wow! Try program your own assembly program wiith hex on your calc
You crash will crash it every minute

That made no sense what-so-ever to me...