[RASMB] update win95

David Hayes hayes at bbri.org
Thu May 13 12:31:00 PDT 2004


Hi Barbara, John,

Thanks for the extra info John.  I think the Beckman service person selected
the mother board for this computer, so that probably explains the force
being with us.  Even so, I was very reluctant to do anything to the computer
at all since if it broke, the XLI would be down and we had experiments to
do.

Therefore, as a note of caution, I would like to suggest that if Barbara
does try to upgrade the current system to windows 98, that you have a fall
back plan just in case something in the upgrade path does not work.

One method that takes a little practice but I have found useful is to zip
the entire hard drive with winzip or pkzip with the system and hidden files
setting on and then store it on a Writable CD.  That way you have all the
software settings and if a disaster occurs you boot with a floppy, reformat
and unzip the hard drive and you are back to where you were.  This process
makes everyone who uses it nervous, but in case of a disaster, it is
comforting to be able to at least try.

What I actually did with the computer we had was to get a new hard drive,
made the old hard drive the slave drive and put in the new hard drive as the
master hard drive and then installed windows 98SE on the new drive.  So the
hardware and bios were identical, only the software on the hard drive was
upgraded.  Note I had to have a copy of the latest Beckman software to do
this.  Using this method, if anything went wrong, I just had to disconnect
the new hard drive and put the old hard drive as the master.  (and once file
sharing was working I could copy the data from the old had drive to our 250
GB backup drive instead of making 20-30 cd's for backup) And this actually
did happen:  I did not know about the xla.ini file or to reset the
interference optics.  The result was that the software thought that pixel 1
was 5.85 centimeters and that pixel 2047 was 7.15 cm.  I even did a run with
this and then noticed it when finding the meniscus.  I put the old hard
drive back as the master and used the machine for a week as it was while I
found out about theses issues and successfully  completed the system setup.

Hope this helps.

David Hayes

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Philo" <jphilo at mailway.com>
To: "Rasmb" <rasmb at server1.bbri.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 13, 2004 11:05 AM
Subject: RE: [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
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------
>
> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> RASMB mailing list
> RASMB at rasmb-email.bbri.org
> http://rasmb-email.bbri.org/mailman/listinfo/rasmb




More information about the RASMB mailing list