From: "Kali McLaughlin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Organization: Flowtrack
Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2000 00:11:26 +0000
X-Mailer: Arachne V1.60
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Problems for newbies
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
Dear List:
Sorry for this rather late contribution:
I forgot that I was not subscribed from this address and my previous
posting failed. Thankfully I have FTP installed and can bounce this
email through my usual server.
I can add a couple of other avoidable problems newbies have with
Arachne.
I agree of course that the fundamental problem is usually comm ports.
One misdirection I was taken in by was that that arachne could dial out
OK but not talk PPP. I assumed that if I got modem action then I was on
the right port. This can be not the case if there is something like a
mouse or other comms program on the port or wrong base address specified.
I suspect many of the reported
"nothing heard" difficulties during terminal login are of this nature.
I actually like the manual login as it tells you something is happening,
and what speed the modem has run and so on. Nothing is worse than
waiting in silence for nothing to happen!
The wizards are a great improvement for newbies I think, as they avoid
another problem I had - mixing up the options screen with the TCP/IP
setup screen. Because the overall "look" of the screens are similar I
find I was not reading closely enough to realise they were different. I
know this sounds impossible, but I am a bit blind, my screen is not good,
and one gets tired after trying ones tenth setup attempt.
The traps of error screens have been well analysed. There needs to be a
list of "things to try" when Arachne wont run - like hit reload, go
back, reboot, change modem speed, look at path entries and look for
backslashes, check that TEMP exists and CACHE exists, unload mouse, etc
I repeat that the back arrow key is really confusing and people reliably
fill the keyboard buffer with history requests after not realising they
are not in a text box.
Also the default setting of esc should be "goes back", not close
program!
Being a mouse hater, I would like a couple more hot keys such as "get
mail" and "send mail".
One last problem I have had is that you cant save mail during
composition. On crashy computers this is really annoying.
Like LD Best, I have to get back to my vehicles bodywork - the mud I
fear is holding on several panels!
Kali
-- This mail was written by user of Arachne, the Ultimate Internet Client
