>> I have a MicroVAX II which has started garbling and losing >> characters output to the console. [...] > IĆ¢??ve seen similar with under two occasions. [...]
Furthermore, "garbling" is horribly imprecise. If certain characters always get corrupted, and a given character always gets corrupted to the same thing? If it's always the same characters getting corrupted, but they get corrupted to different things on different occasions? If there's no uniformity on which characters get corrupted, but a given character, if corrupted, always gets corrupted to the same thing? If both which characters get corrupted and what they get converted into show no consistency? Each of those scenarios points towards a different constellation of plausible causes. (Furthermore "same characters" can be taken either of two ways, either "characters with the same bit pattern, regardless of where they occur" or "characters at the same place in the output, regardless of bit pattern". It could even be a cross between those.) Similar remarks apply to "losing". The post also said >> It had seemed that re-seating the processor board would fix it, but >> that no longer seems to be the case. It occurs to me that it might not have been the re-seating that was responsible, but something else incidental to that. For example, if the problem is thermal, powering it off briefly might have helped; if (to continue that theory) if the environment has been getting hotter, it may be that leaving it off briefly now doesn't cool it enough. Without more details, we can't really do much but take stabs in the dark. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B