Getting hard locks after years of solid use

[Chisel]

I've had my Pulsar II setup for years and haven't had any locking issues before this week. I took a hiatus from music for awhile and when I tried starting a new project this week, my computer kept on hard locking about 20 minutes or so into the session. It would seem to lock quicker if I launched IE in the background. I did some troubleshooting and was able to get it to lock by just launching SFP.EXE and letting it sit there. I haven't made any changes to my Scope configuration in years. I verified that there are no IRQ issues and I have very few processes running in the background. The only thing I can think of is that I upgraded my XP from SP2 to SP3 during my break from making music. Besides that, I don't know what else it could be. I was kinda shocked given that it's been so solid for years. I may try downgrading back to SP2 if nothing else works.

Peace \/
chisel316

[garyb]

is this happening while a midi controller is connected?

sp3 is fine, here....

[siriusbliss]

Either that or possibly worth taking some time to take out the card and clean contacts, and re-seat the card?

I did that a couple times over the years - especially if the system has been sitting for a while.

Greg

[dawman]

It's almost impossible to go back to SP2.
I had taken my ancient Giga DAW into to get a video card upgrade and re install windows and didn't realize that SP3 was out.
When I got it back Kontakt and Gigastudio were damn near worthless.
After frustrating gigs I upgraded it to Windows 7 32bit and everything works fine.
Sometimes I think the last SP3 was meant to frustrate users into getting Windows 7.

[dante]

Kontakt 4.2 on XP / SP3 ok here.

A cuppla years ago (almost to the day) I had this prob upgrading from SP2 to SP3 :
http://forums.planetz.com/viewtopic.php ... P3#p239269

But Chisel if all else fails maybe consider a re-format / re-install. I had some probs forcing me to do this after a small power dropout a few months ago. So I bought a UPS and an image backup proggy. Either that or try the Scope card in another PC.

[erminardi]

try to clean all gold connectors of your Scope board.
after long time they works bad and features strange beahviours that seems to be software issues.
sometimes I get bad DSP allocation, sometimes strange freeze...
just try it.

[Chisel]

Well I took the advice of my fellow Planet Z members and cleaned the card. It seems to have done the trick. I won't know for sure until I get into a long session and give it a real stress test, but so far so good! Thanks for all your help!

Peace \/
chisel316

[erminardi]

Well, after 11 year of service of my first scope board I've noticed that "cleaning" is the answer for almost 90% of overall problems occurring
Happy music Chisel

[Chisel]

I'm still having lock-ups. I've cleaned and reseated the card twice now. I can reproduce the hard lock by simply opening the SFP program and letting it sit there for a few hours. I only have 23 processes running on my XP SP3 box. Any other ideas?

Thanks,
chisel316

[dante]

It could almost be down to testing same cards in another machine now to try eliminate wether its the cards or the host PC. Unless anyone else got better idea.

The downside of such testing is further wear of contacts though... Weigh this against having to reboot every few hours ?

[siriusbliss]

check your system's power supply.

May be time for an upgrade.

Greg

[Chisel]

I made an image of my system drive and then restored an image I made almost a year ago. The card is working flawlessly with the old image. So now I have to decide whether to stick with this old image or do some more troubleshooting to pinpoint the cause of the lockups and restore the current image. I'm leaning toward the former since I don't really use the computer for much except for web browsing and music. I have a dedicated arcade cabinet and racing cockpit for gaming.

Peace \/
chisel316

[garyb]

I'm still having lock-ups. I've cleaned and reseated the card twice now. I can reproduce the hard lock by simply opening the SFP program and letting it sit there for a few hours. I only have 23 processes running on my XP SP3 box. Any other ideas?

Thanks,
chisel316

sometimes i'm so slow....

the problem was almost certainly a setting in the "properties" page in the device manager for the Scope card. uncheck "reset board if idle". what this setting does is cut power to the card after long periods of inactivity. naturally, any software communicating with the card will lock up when you try to use it.

[Chisel]

I do have that option checked, but I don't think it's the cause of the hard locks. I did the SFP test just to prove that the locks only happen when the Scope interface is initialized. If I use another audio interface, I don't experience any lock ups. I'm thinking it was some software that I installed that uses a service that conflicts with Scope. I notice that not only did the computer hard lock, but I also had terrible latency issues and sound glitches that I never had before. The good news is with this old image that I restored, Scope is working perfectly again.

Peace \/
chisel316

[garyb]

ok, but the key is "after several hours".

disable the setting to be safe anyway, puh-lease. i'm glad you're working again!

[Chisel]

Will do! Thanks for the tip.

Peace \/
chisel316