Appendix C. Something went wrong
In an ideal world, everything would work the first time. Sadly, we don’t live in a perfect world, and your graphing calculator is no exception. Although the TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus-family calculators are designed to be resilient to you making mistakes, you’ll occasionally find yourself with errors that you don’t know how to fix. This appendix is designed to help you out of these jams. There are two broad categories of problems you might encounter while trying to use your calculator.
The first category encompasses “big” problems: the calculator won’t turn on at all, you can’t type anything, or the math you’re performing is returning nonsensical answers. The calculator can’t provide any feedback to help you figure out what’s wrong, because it doesn’t realize anything is wrong. To solve those, take a look at section C.1 of this appendix.
The second category of issues you might encounter consists of smaller problems that display error messages. In these cases, your calculator is alerting you that it can’t move forward with what you’ve asked it to do, and it’s trying to help you solve the problem. The error messages it gives are often hard to understand, though, so section C.2 clarifies what those error messages mean and how to fix them.
We’ll start with the bigger problems: issues that prevent you from doing anything with your calculator.