Crashes

“What to do when things go wrong”

Not fun. An unavoidable part of assembly is the crashing. Some minor glitch in the program, a logic error, whatever…the end result is the same: ka-boom!

It’s much easier to deal with crashes if you test your programs in an emulator, but there’s ultimately no subsitute for running your programs on an actual calculator. In that case try these solutions, in order, to recover from a crash.1

  1. Press ON.
  2. Open the battery case, take a battery, and swivel it on the springy terminal.
  3. Take out all four batteries and re-insert them.
  4. Take out all four batteries and the lithium backup—you’ll need a small phillips-head screwdriver (the screw is pretty dang long).
  5. Take out everything and let the calculator sit on its face for a couple hours to let the power drain out.
  6. Get the reciept and take the calculator back to the store. If they refuse to exchange, make the best of a bad situation and get a TI-86 or 892 this time. Oh, and instead of just throwing the thing away, position it on the sidewalk, and have it and a baseball bat repeatedly attempt to occupy the same co-ordinates in space-time. The spritzing LCD oil does wonders for that ancient bloodlust.

If you remain unable to restore normal function to the calculator, it may be useful to ask for help at one of the external resources.


  1. Exercise discretion in applying these steps. Not all of them are entirely serious. Remember, we (the authors) accept no liability for the consequences of your use of this tutorial. ↩︎

  2. Both of these may be difficult to find, since the 86 is officially discontinued and the 89 is a sort of de-facto discontinued. They’re both still better machines than the Nspire, though. ↩︎