IP-TEC - Infopeople Technical Service Archive: RE: download problems on Netscape

RE: download problems on Netscape

Whittier Public Library (wpl@quick.net)
Tue, 26 Mar 1996 05:10:14 -0800

> We're using Netscape 1.0 and last month we tried several times to download
> 2.0 but were unsuccessful. After waiting for 20-30 minutes for the download
> to complete we finally got a window that said "unable to launch external
> viewer error code=16". We thought it was because our version of Netscape
> was so old that the new one wasn't able to compatibly lay over it. Someone
> at Netscape technical support had told someone that that sometimes was the
> case. That if you didn't upgrade each time a new version came out that it
> was often difficult to do double or triple upgrades successfully.

Your description here is not entirely clear. I read it to suggest
that you have been able to initiate the download, but that it hasn't
successfully finished. Instead, you report, after nearly half an
hour of seemingly progressive downloading, the error message appears.
You have, in other words, made it as far as the Netscape prompt to
save (the new version) to disk, to configure a viewer or to cancel
the transfer. If this is the case, then your problem apparently has
something to do with how Netscape is reacting to having received an
.exe file (e.g., n16e20.exe, the Netscape v.2 self-extracting file).
By "reacting," I mean that Netscape is attempting to run it using a
viewer. This would suggest that your netscape.ini file is setup to
recognize .exe files and to associate them with a particular viewer.
This should not be the case. Check your netscape.ini file [Viewers]
and [Suffixes] sections. Are .exe files among the identified
suffixes? Have you set up a viewer for that type of file? If so,
edit those lines in netscape.ini (using the DOS editor, for example)
to exclude those specifications.

I'm not surprised to hear that Netscape agreed to the specious "bad
overlay" argument you've reported, although your account reads as
if "a friend told a friend told a friend..." You can download any version of
Netscape with any other version; your browser doesn't know the
difference, and it deposits the file where you choose to save it, not
on top of the existing files. The .exe file you download, after all,
is a self-extracting suite of files which must further be setup in
order to begin to resemble your existing Netscape files.

> Well, today we tried to download several other programs (StuffIt Expander,
> Real Audio, and QuickTime to name but afew) and each time we got the same
> results. It appeared as if it were downloading. But after 15-30 minutes
> when the transfer should have been complete we got the same error message
> "unable to launch external viewer error code=16). Can anyone tell us why
> this is happening? And what we can do to fix it?

My suggested diagnosis is very likely simplistic, but it's worth
investigating. You should do likewise with respect to the other
files you refer to above.

If you are waiting several minutes, as you say, for these downloads
to complete, you may actually have the desired files stored on your
hard drive. In spite of the error message, have you tried to run the
files that you've downloaded? Does the size of the downloaded
Netscape file, for example, match--more or less--what the download
site reported it should be? If so, you may have the file you need.

The question remains, then, as to whether or not you'll be able to
set up the latest version. I'm afraid I'm the last person who should
be contributing to that discussion...

Dean C. Rowan
Whittier Public Library