Over at the MacDevCenter, I just bellyached about some mysterious iMovie and QuickTime errors.
Perhaps more frustrating than those temporary setbacks is figuring out what to do when computers spit up error messages such as this:
Naturally, my project disk did have enough room and the proper permissions. So what’s the next step?
In Windows, there’s a little troubleshooting app you can call up, but it’s never given me useful answers. So when inscrutable errors arise, my strategy is to Google the error code plus the name of the recalcitrant program, collect possible fixes, and then try them sequentially. In the case of the iMovie and QuickTime errors I was getting, that approach eventually solved one problem, but surely the programmers could have been more helpful.
Or human, as composer Julian Kwasneski noted about the classic Alesis low-RAM error:
Another of my favorites is Roger Linn’s drum machine message “Select the desired function. (Or desire the selected function.)” If we’re being shown the error of our ways, a little humor can help. I still laugh when I see this error message I saved years ago:
Categories
Audio
Comments (1)
Read More Entries by David Battino.
I just ran into this same issue over the weekend. I was trying to play a movie on my parents machine using an older version of Quicktime for Windows. Unfortunately the movie required Quicktime 7. Did it come back and tell me that I was somewhat out-of luck? Nope. "Unknown Error 8971". What the hell is this, an IBM S/390? Didn't we graduate from numeric error codes with the release of the Macintosh? Isn't this the kind of user experience we were trying to avoid with user friendliness? Ugh.