Trackmate problems [Archive]

AfxToo

11-18-2007, 02:29 PM

No, I have not seen this and if it were widespread there would be a minor uprising. With PCs it's as likely that stability problems are due to the hardware, or much more likely third party device drivers. The vast majority of crashes on Windows are due to software that is not part of the OS. Just part of the price of not having to buy your hardware from one and only one hardware vendor.

You may get a faster response from Dan if you do a little troubleshooting and data gathering beforehand. When TrakMate stops responding, bring up the Task Manager (right click on task bar and select Task Manager) and look at the Performance tab. If the CPU Usage is high, say above 50%, then go to the Processes tab and sort the list by CPU by clicking on the CPU header in the list. Take a look at which process is using the most CPU. Typically the biggest user is System Idle Process, which is a process that runs whenever the computer has nothing else to do, which is most of the time. It's possible that some other process, like an antivirus program or Windows Update will be using nearly all of the CPU. I'm sure Dan will want to know what this display shows.

Next, right click on My Computer and select Manage. Under the Sytem Tools / Event Viewer part of the tree you will see Application and System event logs. If you right click on these you can select Save Log File to save the contents of these to files that you can send to Dan. These may help him see if there are any errors being generated by other processes on your machine. You can browse through these yourself in the right hand pane, looking for yellow warnings and red errors that indicate things that are of concern on your system. These messages tend to be geeky so saving them to files and sending the files to Dan may help him.

While you're in the Computer Management console, click on the Device Manager and look for any red Xs on any of your hardware devices. Red Xs indicate that Windows is having a problem working with that device.

There are other steps that could be taken to capture debugging information from your machine while TrakMate is in a non-responding state, specifically, generate a hang mode dump file that Dan would be able to evaluate with a debugger. By default these dump files are equal in size to the amount of memory in your PC so I would see if Dan would send you instructions on how to generate one just for his processes.

Also make sure your computer is not configured to do anything like power down the communication ports when it thinks they are idle. These settings are usually configured in the system setup (BIOS) that you can access very early in the system boot up, and/or in Windows under the power settings. Every BIOS is different so it's hard to say what to do here. But if there is a setting that tells the computer that it is running a Plug & Play OS then turning that ON wil let the OS control the power saving features.

In Windows right click on your desktop, select Properties, then open the Screen Saver tab, and press the Power button. If you select Always On for a power scheme there should be nothing being powered down to save power as long as the computer is plugged in.

In the meantime, make sure all of your Windows stuff is up to date by running Windows Update and installing all of the high priority updates. I would also install all optional updates involving DirectX since TrakMate relies on that component.