[RASMB] update win95

[John Philo]

Barbara,

What David Hayes said is true, but only part of the story, and Walt/David's
success using a generic PC is certainly not typical (The Force must be with
them!).

First, for the benefit of others on the list who have an XL-A rather than an
XL-I, there is usually no problem using Windows 98 or generic PC with an
XL-A.

The specific issues with the XL-I are related to the video capture board
that resides in the PC. That board is very, very, very finicky about every
conceivable detail of hardware and software. 

Consequently it is true that Beckman hand picks and selects the IBM
computers that they supply, and tests every one extensively. They find that
even when they have ordered exactly the same model, IBM still changes a chip
or the BIOS here and there and thus some work and some don't.

You would probably be better off trying to upgrade the operating system to
Win 98 on the computer supplied by Beckman. If that works you can try
installing a USB card, if not you can go back to Win 95. If you do install a
USB card you must be very careful that it doesn't use the interrupt that is
required by the video capture card (which is NOT plug-and-play and doesn't
tell the operating system that it must have that interrupt line). Beckman
has a document about network cards that describes that issue.

John Philo
Alliance Protein Labs

-----Original Message-----
From: rasmb-admin at rasmb-email.bbri.org
[mailto:rasmb-admin at rasmb-email.bbri.org] On Behalf Of lelj
Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2004 5:07 PM
To: Rasmb
Subject: [RASMB] update win95


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
The older archived RASMB emails can be found at:
http://rasmb-email.bbri.org/rasmb_archives
and current archives at http://rasmb-email.bbri.org/pipermail/rasmb/
Search All the Archives at: http://rasmb-email.bbri.org/rasmb_search.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
------

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


_______________________________________________
RASMB mailing list
RASMB at rasmb-email.bbri.org
http://rasmb-email.bbri.org/mailman/listinfo/rasmb