Chemstation + Windows 11

Discussions about chromatography data systems, LIMS, controllers, computer issues and related topics.

20 posts Page 1 of 2
"[The company's new owners] has decided that all computers at our facilities must be running Windows 11 by the end of the year. Updates will be rolled out automatically."

Ironically, just yesterday I noticed that the PC for our 6890/5975 had been updated to Windows 11. I suspect one of our newbie analysts gave Windows permission to do that, despite being warned not to. And... it still works. So maybe this isn't an issue?

Still, I'm not completely confident that all of our other systems running ChemStation will also work after the switch. Or that installing to a new Win 11 system would go smoothly. I'd heard in the past that 10 was fine, but people have had problems making 11 work.

Does anyone have experience (good or bad) with 11 and chemstation?
I have Chemstation Rev B.04.03 running on a laptop, which was forced into upgrade to Windows 11 by our remote IT department, much to my annoyance. I was also surprised to find Chemstation still working. I use it on Agilent 1100/1200 and 6890.
Whilst not officially supported by Agilent, it seems to be working fine for me.
Windows 11 will work with Chemstation B.04.03 for agilent LCMS after the .net drivers and I/O Libs have been updated.
However long term data acquistion and processing may not be reliable over an extended time period.
MichaelVW wrote:
"[The company's new owners] has decided that all computers at our facilities must be running Windows 11 by the end of the year. Updates will be rolled out automatically."


OMG - the same type of corporate BS as when I was working !!! The company "brains" felt that having one type of laptop, and one type of desktop units would make it easier to provide help. But one might think that a company of that size "might" have a spare computer mouse or keyboard to troubleshoot and get someone working - but I guess that would've been "too-forward" of thinking.

We ended up not having to make any changes, as our instruments' computers were not on the company's computer inventory list !!!
Consumer Products Guy wrote:
OMG - the same type of corporate BS as when I was working !!! The company "brains" felt that having one type of laptop, and one type of desktop units would make it easier to provide help. But one might think that a company of that size "might" have a spare computer mouse or keyboard to troubleshoot and get someone working - but I guess that would've been "too-forward" of thinking.
I've never been a part of such IT teams, but I do believe this is quite an oversimplification of their duties :) Looking after thousands of computers within the corporate network must be excruciating, as they have to a) test the updates and the software that they allow to install (probably hundreds of packages) b) keep an eye for vulnerabilities and security patches c) deal with some pesky corner cases and issues on 1% of computers d) write their own custom software. If there are 2 versions of OS that they have to maintain, then it's 2 times more work. And the team should also be much bigger (which adds complexity to orchestrate that many people). And.. in the end it's possible that companies like Microsoft simply discontinue the support of some Windows version, and you won't be receiving new security patches. Anyway, I'm not saying that they are doing good job (they certainly suck in big companies), but I also appreciate the complexity they have to deal with.

That aside, it's vendors' job to make their software compatible with the new versions of operating systems. I'm a little surprised to see such level of distrust :)
Software Engineer at elsci.io (my contact: stanislav.bashkyrtsev@elsci.io)
I didn't make it clear in my earlier post: we did NOT ever ask IT for support for the standalone computers that ran our instruments.
With MSDChemstation E versions we have success running it with W10, and some with W11, but one thing that doesn't seem to work is the Library Search Reports in Enviroquant data analysis. Using the F version under Mass Hunter does but the older 5975 and 5973 units we have can't run on that.

A bug we found with W10 and W11 with MSDChemstation is that if you have two network cards, one for instrument and one for server, you have to disconnect the server card when starting the instrument software, then you can enable it and all will work, if you don't disable it will give the error that the MS is in use by another system even though it isn't. In W7 and older systems you just simply had to make sure the network card was in the top of the list in the Windows advanced network tab but that doesn't seem to work for W10 and up and is nearly impossible to even find and adjust the list in those.

We also recently had a problem with W10/11 where when looking at data in Enviroquant only the current directory would appear, so if you use a unique directory each day to organize your data, those would disappear. Later we found that if you browse to another drive and come back sometimes it would reappear. Then now on one instrument we can't do the tune evaluation, it says the table is missing for the limits and freezes up, even though you can edit the table and all the information is there. It is just really buggy sometimes with the newer OS.

As for the vendor being responsible for making it work with new OS versions, they will tell you that this software is now obsolete so they do not make fixes for such problems. But also the newer software is not compatible with the older instrument which have been "out of service life" for years. The problem then becomes you need to replace a perfectly working $50,000+ instrument simply because Microsoft changed its OS version.
The past is there to guide us into the future, not to dwell in.
sbashkyrtsev wrote:
Anyway, I'm not saying that they are doing good job (they certainly suck in big companies), but I also appreciate the complexity they have to deal with.


I get that they have to cover their own behinds, and that they're the ones that are going to be in trouble if malware makes its way onto the network from a system running an OS that doesn't get security updates. And I have to admit over the last few years [after a previous acquisition] our IT dept has gotten way better (they used to be unreachable).

It's just frustrating to be in a "corner case" that gets overlooked. Particularly when we take care of our own IT needs 90% of the time (thank goodness for petty cash...). If you're going to take something away from an internal customer, you should give them some decent options for what that thing can be replaced with.

I think they're going to let us keep Win 10 for now, too, but I got quotes from Agilent explaining the $20k in upgrades we need if they ever decide to force us to get 11. I've learned that 5973 compatibility with MassHunter acquisition depends on which kind of smart card (3+ and 3.2 are good, I believe) and sideboard (need fast electronics) you have. 6890Ns are more likely to be upgradeable than 6890+ (I'm not sure if that's an absolute). The firmware version also matters.
I don't know if everything will be working from a hardwate point of view (e.g. interface cards) but before replacing a fully operable LC or GC, maybe a setup with a virtual machine may be worth a try. So the host-pc can be run with the company compliant OS, while the CDS is running on a older OS in a guest machine.
Replacing or upgrading the host machine with more RAM and a good multi-core CPU and an additional OS-licence is still cheaper than a new chromatographic system.

I have done this with a an old second-hand GC, where the computer was running on Windows NT4, and we did not had the CDS installation media and it was workinf just fine for our purpose.
James_Ball wrote:
As for the vendor being responsible for making it work with new OS versions, they will tell you that this software is now obsolete so they do not make fixes for such problems. But also the newer software is not compatible with the older instrument which have been "out of service life" for years. The problem then becomes you need to replace a perfectly working $50,000+ instrument simply because Microsoft changed its OS version.
I'd rephrase it then to: the problem then becomes you need to replace a perfectly working $50,000+ instrument simply because the vendor didn't keep backward compatibility when creating new software. Again, it's the responsibility of the vendor to ensure they create software compatible with their own instruments. It's common courtesy in software development.
MichaelVW wrote:
It's just frustrating to be in a "corner case" that gets overlooked. Particularly when we take care of our own IT needs 90% of the time (thank goodness for petty cash...). If you're going to take something away from an internal customer, you should give them some decent options for what that thing can be replaced with.
I do understand the frustration. Internal IT forgets that their purpose is to help you. Oftentimes the politics within companies turn them into their own entity with their own boss, and you can't have any impact anymore. Even though it all began with the scientists needing a computer to do their work. That's all backwards. My only comment was that their job isn't as easy as it sounded in one of the previous posts :)
Software Engineer at elsci.io (my contact: stanislav.bashkyrtsev@elsci.io)
Win 11 officially is Win 10 kernel with more ads embedded in desktop shell
And more "telemetry" sent to Microsoft
sbashkyrtsev wrote:
the problem then becomes you need to replace a perfectly working $50,000+ instrument simply because the vendor didn't keep backward compatibility.


I'm not sure it's a problem if you're the vendor selling new instrument. I'm kind of surprised some instrument manufacturers as good as they are about supporting old products. There's an incentive for some amount of planned obsolescence. Hardware wise, a lot of us have 5890s that still work great.

Of course there are third party programs. But I kind of wonder if newer instruments will be deliberately designed to make it hard to write third party software. Imagine if Apple bought out one of the big instrument companies: The iGC/MS! Stylish, 4K display, wireless internet, software located on the cloud (accessed by subscription)! You'd have to take out ten screws to change a septum, and would need an Apple Service Engineer to install a column.
MichaelVW wrote:
But I kind of wonder if newer instruments will be deliberately designed to make it hard to write third party software. Imagine if Apple bought out one of the big instrument companies: The iGC/MS! Stylish, 4K display, wireless internet, software located on the cloud (accessed by subscription)! You'd have to take out ten screws to change a septum, and would need an Apple Service Engineer to install a column.
Judging by the file formats - it does seem sometimes that's the case. Though there could've been other reasons to introduce the complications. Still, the fact that they're not eager to share the file structure probably implies that they want others to keep their hands away. Oftentimes it's quite challenging to figure out what's where in those files.

But I think the world in general moves in the other direction, and it becomes more beneficial for more software providers to integrate with you. And maybe there will be enough of incentive to be more open for the LCMS vendors. The new OpenLab for instance already has a simple format without extra complications.
Software Engineer at elsci.io (my contact: stanislav.bashkyrtsev@elsci.io)
sbashkyrtsev wrote:
MichaelVW wrote:
But I kind of wonder if newer instruments will be deliberately designed to make it hard to write third party software. Imagine if Apple bought out one of the big instrument companies: The iGC/MS! Stylish, 4K display, wireless internet, software located on the cloud (accessed by subscription)! You'd have to take out ten screws to change a septum, and would need an Apple Service Engineer to install a column.
Judging by the file formats - it does seem sometimes that's the case. Though there could've been other reasons to introduce the complications. Still, the fact that they're not eager to share the file structure probably implies that they want others to keep their hands away. Oftentimes it's quite challenging to figure out what's where in those files.

But I think the world in general moves in the other direction, and it becomes more beneficial for more software providers to integrate with you. And maybe there will be enough of incentive to be more open for the LCMS vendors. The new OpenLab for instance already has a simple format without extra complications.


OpenLab has a simple format and screen layout but is horrible for data analysis. It is ok if you have a simple method with only a few targets but when you start looking at 50+ target analytes and trying to organize the calibration it is so much more difficult than Enviroquant/MSDChemstation is. The sequence and assigning file names is also not easy unless you use the default naming built into OpenLab and who in their right mind defaults the data directory to Users/Public/Documents/Agilent/1/Data/DateTimeRunStarts? Under MSDChematation and MassHunter we just put our data into GCData/Year or if multiple instruments on one computer GCData/InstrumentName/Year. Then we run sequential numbering which help you have an idea of total injections, and is easy to use by just setting the next number as the first file name in the new sequence and fill/increment down, OpenLab you have to go into sequence settings and type in the new number after you look up what the last datafile was from the previous run, it isn't stored in the sequence at all.

I guess coming from RTE-A Chemstation up through all the iterations of MSDChemstation to MassHunter has spoiled me to having more control over how we setup everything :)
The past is there to guide us into the future, not to dwell in.
James_Ball wrote:
As for the vendor being responsible for making it work with new OS versions, they will tell you that this software is now obsolete so they do not make fixes for such problems. But also the newer software is not compatible with the older instrument which have been "out of service life" for years. The problem then becomes you need to replace a perfectly working $50,000+ instrument simply because Microsoft changed its OS version.

This is exactly how I explain having Win98, WinNT4, and WinXP on my lab instruments. And VMWare 15 running Win10 on my Win7Pro64 office machine here at work for my quickbooks. I keep all the lab instruments and PC's on a separate subnet with no internet access. Dual NIC's in the office PC let me pull data up to the front for reporting.
20 posts Page 1 of 2

Who is online

In total there is 1 user online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 1 guest (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 1117 on Mon Jan 31, 2022 2:50 pm

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest

Latest Blog Posts from Separation Science

Separation Science offers free learning from the experts covering methods, applications, webinars, eSeminars, videos, tutorials for users of liquid chromatography, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, sample preparation and related analytical techniques.

Subscribe to our eNewsletter with daily, weekly or monthly updates: Food & Beverage, Environmental, (Bio)Pharmaceutical, Bioclinical, Liquid Chromatography, Gas Chromatography and Mass Spectrometry.

Liquid Chromatography

Gas Chromatography

Mass Spectrometry