[RASMB] update win95

Thu May 13 09:47:01 PDT 2004

Hi Barbara,

I am working for Walter Stafford at BBRI.  We do have an XLI connected to a
Windows 98 Machine.  Recently I re-installed the windows 98 operating system
so that we could turn on network file sharing.
It is not true that only IBM brand computers can be used.  But certainly you
are stuck with IBM compatible computers (no Macintosh or power pc's).  The
computer we have is a clone thrown together to run the machine.  The
motherboard is made by Intel, the box is made by IBM, the two hard drives
are by quantum and Seagate, and the other pieces are hard to determine.  You
may want to ask the service person what they meant by IBM:  did they mean
IBM and not Macintosh or did they mean the one company IBM.  In any case, it
is good advice to try the IBM brand of computer also:  the reason for this
is that many computer manufacturers may bend the specifications a little to
reduce manufacturing costs, make their computer different and better, or
just because they are incompetent.  The choice of computer makes a
difference because the video capture board is finicky and old technology and
it may care about details of the PCI interface bus that are transparent to
most add in boards.  I would think that a business system like a Compaq
deskpro would be just as good as an IBM branded machine.  Any clone that has
a standard Intel made motherboard would probably be OK also.
I do not know if the instrument has to have an upgrade to understand windows
98.  The machine we have here had windows 98 installed when I got here.  The
Beckman service person seemed to indicate that what had to be in snyc was
the version of the Beckman software and the on instrument firmware programs.
If you can install and run the same software as you had before, you should
be OK (but always hang on to that old computer just in case).
The service person we talk to said that nothing newer than windows 98 could
be used unless you bought the $20,000 upgrade to the digital video capture
board.  We did not get any more details.
When I re-installed windows 98 on the computer we have connected to our XLI,
I found out some interesting things:
1.  The COM ports that talk to the instrument must have a setting to have
the lowest possible FIFO buffering (but do not turn off the buffering with
the check box, just slide the buffering to lowest).  This is an operating
system setting that you must do once every time you install an operating
system (even a reinstall on the same computer).
2.  The PCI slot IRQ number where the video capture board is sitting should
be set to highest priority in the system advanced bios.  This is also a step
that must be made once per computer but is not affected by the operating
system.
3.  There is a magical cal_parm.cal file that is written to the root
directory of your boot hard drive (usually C:\).  This is a machine specific
calibration file and should be copied to your new machine.  Beckman service
did not explain how to recreate this file if needed but copying it seemed to
work.
4.  The radial calibration of the interference optics is in the
[bootdisk]:\widows\xla.ini file.  Either copy this file to a new machine
(after the install) or make sure you perform an interference optics radial
calibration with a counterweight before using the instrument.  The Beckman
software install copies an xla.ini file when installing, but it has no
entries for cm/pixel or radial calibration.
5.  Said one computer hacker to another, "How can we make windows crash??"
Answer:  "Install it."  I had previously worked for a commercial software
company.  Our software product regularly trashed windows while in the beta
cycle.  Windows is almost impossible to fix, 90% of the time only a fresh
install of the operating system will work.  I have installed various forms
of windows over 500 times, but it is still mysterious.  One of the most
stable releases of windows is windows 98SE (the SE is important).  I am
surprised that your new computer did not talk to your XLI unless you did not
know about the com port buffering setting.
6.  You may be able to turn on file sharing on your old computer and then
network out to a newer computer with USB.

In conclusion:  though the XLI is finicky, your problems are most probably
software problems and not hardware problems.  It is difficult to give
computer advice in general since there are so many variables.  For instance,
setting the video capture PCI and slot priority high is a little different
on every computer depending on the boot BIOS.  If you decide to try again
and want to get some more input, you could call me here at BBRI if you wish:
(David Hayes 617-658-7738).  It would be better to look around for a
trustworthy computer geek who could sit at the computer -- phone
consultation on computer setup is always only %33 as effective as an in
person visit in my experience.

David Hayes
Boston Biomedical Research Institute
64 Grove St.
Watertown, MA  02472

----- Original Message -----
From: "lelj" <lelj at interchange.ubc.ca>
To: "Rasmb" <rasmb at rasmb-email.bbri.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2004 8:07 PM
Subject: [RASMB] update win95

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> Hello everybody,
>
> I have a XLI with windows 95 installed. We've tried to change the computer
in order to have windows 98.
> We've had all sort of problems, expecially re: connection between computer
and instrument, so after trying to have some help from the beckman people we
concluded that the easiest thing to do was going back to the old computer
(that likely we kept!)
>
> I have a couple of questions:
> does anyone have win98 or higher on the machine attached to the XLI?
> is it true that ONLY IBM computers should be used (that was one of the
anwers we got from beckman)
> is there a procedure to upgrage the instrument to understand win98 or
higeher?
>
> the reson we would like to update is to have a USB port from where we can
easily get the data and Win95 doesn't support USB ports!
>
> thank you very much for any feedback!
> Barbara
>
> ---
> Barbara Lelj Garolla Di Bard
> Dr. Mauk's Lab
> Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
> University of British Columbia
> 2146 Health Sciences Mall
> Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z3
> Phone: (604) 822-2526
>
>
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