Chromatography Forum

Hello, we recently made an upgrade to Empower 2 Enterprise System from Empower 1 Enterprise system. Empower 2 is upgraded through FR 5. The Data Acquisition Servers are running XP professional and a majority of the use is through Citrix.
Our DAS are randomly freezing; sometimes the systems run 1-2 weeks with a problem, other times they don't last 24 hrs. We have 7 DAS and the problem was initially limited to 2 but a 3rd system has started having problems as well.
Thank you for any help.
sTeven

Hi, what computer ar you using?
We have had terrible problems with HP dc7700.

Now that the horse is gone, I'll close the barn door... and tell you that FR5 was only needed if you were going to run Vista on your fat clients and/or LAC/Es.

Try to track down the source of the problem and describe the specific symptoms of the freezes to Waters. Check your LAC/Es' logs (Event Viewer - Application and System events). Are you running McAfee or similar anti-malware and/or port scanning software? Is it possible that updates to such programs were recently pushed onto your LAC/Es without your knowledge (checking event logs will reveal this too)? Are they just buffering data because of network connectivity issues and you just need to reboot them or run c:\empower\bin\Instrumentserver-recover?

Thanks everyone for the help so far. Here is a little more info.

We have 4 Dell Optiplex 760 desktops deing used for our client servers. The computers were new for Empower 2. Overall, Empower 2 was implemented as a new installation instead of upgrading from Empower 1. We were under a service contract so we just provided the hardware and let Waters do their thing with the software install.

The symptom is that the computer looks like it is on with a blank screen power saver on. The power and network on the computer are on and the caps lock light is on, but the computer is dead/unresponsive. It requires a hard power cycle to get it back on.

All power saving settings are turned off (hard disks always on, no hibernation, etc.). We did run into updates being pushed onto the boxes, but that problem has been resolved. All four computers are identical installations, but the problem is only showing up on 2 of them. We've checked the computer event logs, but nothing helpful is showing up. We've provided plenty of clearance around the computers in case overheating was the problem.

This has been frustrating to say the least. It doesn't happen often enough or consistently enough for Waters or our IT group to serious interest in the problem.

Just some thoughts:
Is all the error reporting disabled?
drwtsn32 disabled?
The settings for XP service pack 2 applied in Windows? (There are some notes from Water about this)

Ace

If these PCs aren't running on Intel Extreme graphics, reseat the video cards, make certain that any fan controlled via CMOS settings is left on high speed (not variable speed), see that the insides do not need a good dusting and see that all 4 have the exact same (hopefully recent) video driver installed.

It sounds like a video section overheat or (possibly a memory leak prompting) video driver issue.