Chromatography Forum

I am looking for a good source to answer some questions about Ez-Chrom. Our laboratory recently made a switch from Empower to Ez-Chrom and have some questions as we work through our internal resources. Is there somebody within Agilent or on this forum who can help us with questions. I am located in the Houston, TX USA area.

Thanks in advance.

yes you can
there are several persons here that know ezchrom, and at least 2 that are part of the agilent team of support for ezchrom.
so you will be pretty much covered

Hi, you can either post your questions here or drop me an email. See my profile. We do have seasoned people in Texas however!

I have asked my staff for some detailed questions and here are two issues:

Passwords - Is there a way to have the system configured such a password is not required everytime you log into an instrument?

Speed - Connections are painfully slow and sometimes we can’t get instrument to connect at all without ending the processes on the EZ server with a termination program we wrote. Trying to open things or edit things too quickly can cause the interface to lock up, also leading to the use of this termination program. Making two mouse clicks too close together in time will also cause the lock up.

Thanks again for everybody's help.

Performance should be snappy, what instruments are you using? Login, no it is as designed. Openlab Ezchrom has it as you wish it.

are you in a client server set up or simply using the system as stand alone?

there is a very old unresolved bug in ezchrom.
the processes stay open instead of closing and if you do not restart the PC every few days then the tasks are filled with junk processes from ezchrom.
now in a client server configuration there should be the possibility to close processes of the instrument via the enterprise window, it is on the right click options. if it works, it is only after you do it twice. generally you'll know the first time around that a restart is needed because the procedure hangs too much

also if you have a PC with slightly slow graphic displays then when having the window in full size open, the software is slow to respond. this happens mostly in the pump window where you set the gradient. it is sometimes so slow you want to shoot the PC.
the low cost solution is to know not to have the instrument window open fully, simply make it a few mm smaller on the screen and this for some reason fixes things.

for the password, if it has not been fixed yet, there is a "bug", you can create a generic user and leave the password blank: GLP at is best

We are using a client / server configuration with 10 EZ-Server boxes. The end users are running Windows 7.

The instruments are Agilent 6890s and 7890s for the most part with Waters Alliance HPLCs.

in a former place we worked we did at first every week a restart to all ez-servers on Monday morning it will help to clean those ezchrom left over processes
after a while we saw we could do it every 2 weeks
now are you connected in client server mode via citrix or TS?
if yes then you will also need to monitor the users. some of them will tend to hang, mostly for no apparent reason, just because.
it is good if someone from the lab is capable to see those and simply kill them.
and also the file servers and TS or citrix servers require a restart every so often. sometime they also have leaks into the RAM from ezchrom.
another tendency with client server settings is to not allow for automatic updates because that means a restart. so you must make a predefined time for your enterprise to update the windows and also the anti-viruses. if not you will find yourself a sitting duck within 6 month. you can combine that once a month with the restart for the ezserver and the file servers.

also some of your slow downs or halts of the system could be back up related. have you made sure that you are "hot backing up" the file server?

we got ride of most of those issues when we moved to chromeleon.

kdix, I see that you installed the EZCHrom on Windows 7. For EZChrom Windows 7 32 bit is supported officially with 3.3.2 SP3, released 2 weels ago. Which version did you install?
Furthermore, there are some annoying Windows .Net behaviours that need to be under control. I cna help you with that, but please send me an email to freek_varossieau@agilent.com. THen we can look into your specific system 1-on-1.

As I said before, when I install systems they are snappy, so we can solve your problem I believe.