My Mpower has a problem with time and space which I never observed
during the five years I owned a Classic.
At the end of words, it quite often exhibits one of the following two
phenomena:
1. If the final character of a word (such as the ing sign) or the
final two characters of a word (such as the abbreviations for tion,
ally, less, etc.) is or are an abbreviation which would require
translation if I wanted Grade I or computer braille, the following
space is not recorded, and the word runs into the next word. It's as
though the unit was taking time to translate the abbreviation then
and there, and by the time it finished the translation is has
forgotten or lost the space between the word it just translated and
the next word. Sometimes it fails to record the first character or
so of the next word as well.
As far as I can determine, all settings for the wordprocesor
concerning grade of braille displayed, type of file for new files,
etc., are at their default values.
2. When a word ends with a character which would be a command if
chorded (such as t for tab, s for save, t-h-e sign for entry into the
format menu), the unit combines that character with the following
space and acts on the resulting command. I lost a lot of notes at a
recent seminar because the unit would exit the file if I typed two
words where the first one ended in e: the unit treated that e and the
following space as a chord-e and exited the file. If a word ended in
t, I would find tabs in the file instead of the t ending the intended
word. When using the contraction for t-h-e, the unit would go into
the format menu and interpret subsequent characters as commands in
that menu. At other times I would check my notes to edit something
and would discover that I was in some entirely unintended function or
menu and that much of what I had just typed had not been captured as
part of the file. If I had been using the unit with speech on
request, or with speech turned on, I might have gotten verbal
warnings when the unit left text entry and went to a menu or out of
the wordprocessor entirely. But with speech turned off, I got no such warning.
My theory is that the faster processor in the Mpower has not yet been
perfectly adapted to by the software and that the software does not
reliably distinguish between a character and the spacebar when
entered separately and the same character when it is intentionally chorded.
There could, of course, be some operator error, particularly when
entering data very quickly. But I doubt that my error rate in this
regard has risen to five or ten times what it was when using the Classic.
My Mpower also occasionally stutters, most often, but not only, when
being turned on. So I wonder if there is a buffering or timing
problem which might cause both the stuttering and the bn's mistaken
chording of final characters.
Any thoughts or fixes would be welcome, as both I and my readers are
annoyed when I have to go back and re-enter substantial amounts of
data or notes which have, without my knowing it, been entered as
unaccepted commands into the format menu or as a two-paragraph-long file name.
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