My PageStream 5058 Pro has suddenly become useless. I can't open a file; the
Font Substitution requester comes up and stays empty. Obviously something is
going on; everything else runs very slowly, not getting a fair crack at CPU
time.

That requester has been intermittently troublesome. Very rarely a list of
fonts will show up in a matter of seconds. Sometimes I have left it while I
went to have lunch and it will be OK when I get back. This morning I left
it while I spent some time on Usenet, and when I came back the fonts were
listed. I clicked "OK" with no obvious response and sort of took a nap
waiting for something to happen. Nothing did, so I rebooted and tried
again. Waited 20 minutes once before giving up. I started it again about
half an hour ago (had some e-mail to do) and I see the fonts are filled in
again. I clicked "OK" and will check back before posting this, hoping
something will happen in the meantime.

The Font Substitution requester (or a close cousin) keeps coming up when I
copy and want to paste text. Even if I select the font I want, it changes
to the font around the place I paste it into.

I never want to substitute font anymore. Is there any way to turn the font
requester off?

It had been 20 minutes since I clicked "OK" and nothing had happened yet. So
I went to lunch and when I came back 45 minutes later, the document had
opened. That's when I remembered I had been trying to open an old one that
had opened quickly two days ago when I used it as the basis for the new
one. I tried to close it by clicking the close gadget. Twenty-five minutes
later, it's still there with the "clock" cursor.

I only wanted to print the thing. Fortunately I had made a PDF, so I can
still do that, but no mail merge.
--
Bart Mathias
AmigaOne XE-G4 OS4.1u3

new or old amiga?
off the top of my head and not knowing your system i'd say this is a hardware issue..
Is it only while running pagestream? or do other programs have similar response times?

On Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:36:38 -0500, Bart Mathias <mathias@hawaii.edu> wrote:

> My PageStream 5058 Pro has suddenly become useless. I can't open a file; the
> Font Substitution requester comes up and stays empty. Obviously something is
> going on; everything else runs very slowly, not getting a fair crack at CPU
> time.
>
--
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On 11/29/2011, admfubar@gmail.com wrote:

> new or old amiga?

I think all AmigaOnes are pretty old. Mine's eight years old, I think.

> off the top of my head and not knowing your system i'd say this is a
> hardware issue.. Is it only while running pagestream? or do other
> programs have similar response times?

No, everything else is at least as quick as I would expect. PageStream
itself is fast enough, once it gets up, as long as fonts aren't involved.

> On Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:36:38 -0500, Bart Mathias <mathias@hawaii.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> My PageStream 5058 Pro has suddenly become useless. I can't open a
>> file; the Font Substitution requester comes up and stays empty.
>> Obviously something is going on; everything else runs very slowly, not
>> getting a fair crack at CPU time.
>>
--
Bart Mathias
AmigaOne XE-G4 OS4.1u3

I take it you use this machine a lot? I leaning towards the harddrive starting to fail. the errors happen to be in the section that pagestream needs to access.
try doing a list of the font directory that pagestream uses that is giving it trouble. and also see if the listing is quick for the pagestream directory.
i suspect seek errors or a large number of ecc events occurring on the drive. also check the battery for the clock too, the battery may be dead, and might need to be replaced.

On Tue, 29 Nov 2011 22:29:24 -0500, Bart Mathias <mathias@hawaii.edu> wrote:

> On 11/29/2011, admfubar@gmail.com wrote:
>
>> new or old amiga?
>
> I think all AmigaOnes are pretty old. Mine's eight years old, I think.
>
>> off the top of my head and not knowing your system i'd say this is a
>> hardware issue.. Is it only while running pagestream? or do other
>> programs have similar response times?
>
> No, everything else is at least as quick as I would expect. PageStream
> itself is fast enough, once it gets up, as long as fonts aren't involved.
>
>> On Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:36:38 -0500, Bart Mathias <mathias@hawaii.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> My PageStream 5058 Pro has suddenly become useless. I can't open a
>>> file; the Font Substitution requester comes up and stays empty.
>>> Obviously something is going on; everything else runs very slowly, not
>>> getting a fair crack at CPU time.
>>>

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Using Opera's revolutionary email client:http://www.opera.com/mail/

On 11/29/2011 10:42 PM, admfubar@gmail.com wrote:
>
> i suspect seek errors or a large number of ecc events occurring on the
> drive. also check the battery for the clock too, the battery may be
> dead, and might need to be replaced.
>
I can vouch for battery problems on the AmigaOne. I had both models
of the A1 and both exhibited strange and not necessarily consistent
problems when the battery needed replacement. This is a cheap test and
easier to do than replace a hard drive.

Good Luck with the system.

> On Tue, 29 Nov 2011 22:29:24 -0500, Bart Mathias <mathias@hawaii.edu
> <mailto:mathias%40hawaii.edu>> wrote:
>
> > On 11/29/2011, admfubar@gmail.com <mailto:admfubar%40gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> new or old amiga?
> >
> > I think all AmigaOnes are pretty old. Mine's eight years old, I think.
> >
> >> off the top of my head and not knowing your system i'd say this is a
> >> hardware issue.. Is it only while running pagestream? or do other
> >> programs have similar response times?
> >
> > No, everything else is at least as quick as I would expect. PageStream
> > itself is fast enough, once it gets up, as long as fonts aren't involved.
> >
> >> On Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:36:38 -0500, Bart Mathias <mathias@hawaii.edu
> <mailto:mathias%40hawaii.edu>>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >>> My PageStream 5058 Pro has suddenly become useless. I can't open a
> >>> file; the Font Substitution requester comes up and stays empty.
> >>> Obviously something is going on; everything else runs very slowly, not
> >>> getting a fair crack at CPU time.
> >>>
>
--
Dr. Larry Keller
Ohio Amigan
lkeller100@cox.net

On 11/29/2011, admfubar@gmail.com wrote:

> I take it you use this machine a lot? I leaning towards the harddrive
> starting to fail. the errors happen to be in the section that
> pagestream needs to access. try doing a list of the font directory
> that pagestream uses that is giving it trouble. and also see if the
> listing is quick for the pagestream directory. i suspect seek errors or
> a large number of ecc events occurring on the drive. also check the
> battery for the clock too, the battery may be dead, and might need to
> be replaced--

Thanks for some interesting leads. The hard drive in question is the newest
of three, abour four, maybe five, years old and still less than half
partitioned, but I do leave the machine on for hours at a time, five or six
days a week, so I'm afraid that is a possibility.

I'm pretty sure I replaced the battery in February (turned out the battery
wasn't the problem then, though) and they usually last me two or three
years. I've been very happy with how the thing has been running with very
few problems this year, but some strange things are starting to happen. One
is that when I get my e-mail downlisted by YAM, for the last few days
instead of being instantaneous, I see each line being written, taking
nearly a second to list 28 e-mails. And a few minutes ago when I clicked
the Media Toolbox icon to see what it said about the drive, up came a "USB
Printer" alert, "The driver failed to access the device Do you want to
Retry?" Clicking "Cancel" just brings it up again, over and over. Turning
the printer on solves this problem, but Media Toolbox shouldn't care
whether I have a printer or not. Battery problem? Hard drive problem?

I'm not sure exactly what "try doing a list of the font directory that
pagestream uses that is giving it trouble" means. So far as I know,
PageStream uses SYS:Fonts/_TrueType, but I doubt you mean to list that.
(But I did it anyway. Nothing interesting, of course.)

Two things I will do: 1. Run smartcl on it and see if I can figure out
whether the results show a problem. 2. Try opening the troublesome
FinalWriter documents on my SAM 460. If I have no problems with them on
that machine, that will be strong evidence that I'm having hardware
problems on the A1.
--
Bart Mathias
AmigaOne XE-G4 OS4.1u3

I'm leaning that it is a harddrive problem.... next easiest to check, after that it my be the drive controller.
Is it only one drive giving you these types of problems? If so then it is more likely a harddrive problem.

is it a pata type drive? or newer serial, i'm thinking it has to be the parallel drive, and those are getting harder to find.
oh have you added any drives to the system before this started to happen? harddrive or rom drive??? it could be an improper mast/slave setting and if you are using a cable select setting, that might be where there is a failure happening
also make sure that the master drive (wich should also be the boot drive) is on the end of the cable and not in the middle connector on an ide bus.

On Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:01:14 -0500, Bart Mathias <mathias@hawaii.edu> wrote:

> On 11/29/2011, admfubar@gmail.com wrote:
>
>> I take it you use this machine a lot? I leaning towards the harddrive
>> starting to fail. the errors happen to be in the section that
>> pagestream needs to access. try doing a list of the font directory
>> that pagestream uses that is giving it trouble. and also see if the
>> listing is quick for the pagestream directory. i suspect seek errors or
>> a large number of ecc events occurring on the drive. also check the
>> battery for the clock too, the battery may be dead, and might need to
>> be replaced--
>
> Thanks for some interesting leads. The hard drive in question is the newest
> of three, abour four, maybe five, years old and still less than half
> partitioned, but I do leave the machine on for hours at a time, five or six
> days a week, so I'm afraid that is a possibility.
>
> I'm pretty sure I replaced the battery in February (turned out the battery
> wasn't the problem then, though) and they usually last me two or three
> years. I've been very happy with how the thing has been running with very
> few problems this year, but some strange things are starting to happen. One
> is that when I get my e-mail downlisted by YAM, for the last few days
> instead of being instantaneous, I see each line being written, taking
> nearly a second to list 28 e-mails. And a few minutes ago when I clicked
> the Media Toolbox icon to see what it said about the drive, up came a "USB
> Printer" alert, "The driver failed to access the device Do you want to
> Retry?" Clicking "Cancel" just brings it up again, over and over. Turning
> the printer on solves this problem, but Media Toolbox shouldn't care
> whether I have a printer or not. Battery problem? Hard drive problem?
>
> I'm not sure exactly what "try doing a list of the font directory that
> pagestream uses that is giving it trouble" means. So far as I know,
> PageStream uses SYS:Fonts/_TrueType, but I doubt you mean to list that.
> (But I did it anyway. Nothing interesting, of course.)
>
> Two things I will do: 1. Run smartcl on it and see if I can figure out
> whether the results show a problem. 2. Try opening the troublesome
> FinalWriter documents on my SAM 460. If I have no problems with them on
> that machine, that will be strong evidence that I'm having hardware
> problems on the A1.
> --
> Bart Mathias
> AmigaOne XE-G4 OS4.1u3
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> PageStream Amiga. Desktop Publishing for Classic Amiga, OS4, and MorphOS.http://www.pagestream.orgYahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>

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