My winding road. . . . . .

 

I bought a used Fujitsu Lifebook P2100 (very compact laptop, transmeta processor, windows XP Home OS) off of Ebay about 6 or 7 months ago to have something small enough to throw in my Scrabble bag and dedicate for Scrabble use (Quackle, Zyzzyva, LeXpert), and for websurfing, email and possibly occasional document preparation, transfer, etc.  

 

I loved the size, weight, and functionality.  It worked perfectly with the single exception that Quackle would not run on it (it appears to download just fine, and all the relevant files seem to be there, but when I try to run it, the Welcome screen starts to come up, and then the dreaded “Quackle.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close.  We are sorry for the inconvenience.” dialog comes up.

 

Several members of our community (including John O’Laughlin and John Fultz) offered suggestions (John O spent a ridiculous amount of time on the phone with me trying to sort out the issue).  John and John physically looked at my laptop at a tournament we attended in May.  All to no avail.

 

Having previously been curious about Linux, I decided to install Linux and see if that would solve the problem.  I installed Linux myself.  Then, with a ton of help from John O and Alec Berryman, I eventually got Quackle to run on my Fujitsu, and for LeXpert to run under WINE.  Zyzzyva wouldn’t run.

 

I then discovered that I couldn’t get my wireless card to work (despite considerable time and effort and suggested approaches from Linux wizes on the web).  The power saving features on my laptop also wouldn’t work and I was burning through my batteries in a fraction of the time they lasted with the Windows OS.

 

I recently decided to do a clean install of Windows XP Home Edition and try again with Quackle.  Same problem as before. 

 

I don’t know if this made any sense, but I thought I’d see if installing Quackle on a thumb drive and running it from there would work—it did not, same old error message as the Welcome screen appears.

 

Another twiddle I tried was to just copy the Quackle folder from my desktop computer to my thumb drive and try that.  It would run on my heavy old Dell laptop just fine.  On the Fujitsu, it would get one step further than if I installed it directly.  The Welcome screen comes up and I do not get any error messages.  I can see the choices if I click “Game”, “Move”, or “Help”.  But if I click anything which requires an actual function, then the “Quackle.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close.  We are sorry for the inconvenience.” dialog comes up.

 

Admirably, Fujitsu provides free technical support over the phone, even in cases like mine.  First and second level technicians had no clue what was going on—couldn’t think of a reason it wouldn’t work.

 

Thus ends my highly abridged tale of woe up to the current moment.

 

Does anyone out there have any ideas?  If I can’t get this fixed pretty soon, I’ll probably resell the computer on eBay and try to find something else.

 

Regards,

Ben Withers

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