program crashes 2-3 times/day?

[2-Wheeler]

Hello, I'm a newbie and am just trying out the WD software. I am having a lot of trouble with crashes, where the program just locks up. When this happens, I can't even do a ctrl-alt-del to kill the program. It is happening at least twice a day.

I am running version 10.33 it with LaCrosse 3610 and HeavyWeather. Currently it is on an older PC with Win-98.  It seems to work for a few hours then crashes. I can't seem to tell anything unusual from the log files.

Will more PC horsepower stop it from crashing?
Will an upgrade to the later (10.33e?) version fix this?
Is there some settings I should have set differently?

(I'm not a programmer and am stumbling my way through this.)

UPDATE (3/16/06): WD is running fine now, but weather station hardware is being upgraded.

[HobbyTalk]

Win98 isn't the most stable OS to begain with If this is an old computer that has been used in the past I would suggest that you format the hard drive and reinstall Win98. With use, Win98 can become really unstable and a new install can really help it out.

[2-Wheeler]

Win98 isn't the most stable OS to begain with If this is an old computer that has been used in the past I would suggest that you format the hard drive and reinstall Win98. With use, Win98 can become really unstable and a new install can really help it out.

Thanks. I needed a separate machine to leave running 24x7 with only the weather stuff running. I realized Win-98 wasn't the most stable, but it was better than ME 

So I started with a formatted HDD and clean install of Win-98 sp2 and followed that with a Windows Update to get all the latest patches. I then removed a bunch of the extra Wndows baggage and ended up with a very clean system. It's not running any screen savers or power mode savings.

I've got a new machine on the way, but didn't feel too confident that would solve the problem. If nothing else it should run a bit faster and give me some more space.

[Weather Display]

Hi
the 3600 stations communication is very heavy on the CPU
and so that wont help on a slower older PC running win98
A higher end PC should help alot I would say
Brian

[HobbyTalk]

I new machine running XP should be fine. I ran 8 days in the last session without rebooting/restarting before updating WD to the latest version.

[2-Wheeler]

Thanks for the replies. I'll post an update next, week after I've had a chance to move things over to the new machine. 

How long can I expect things to run smoothly without attention? 

[HobbyTalk]

I'm one of the more newbie users here so maybe I'm not the one to give the best opinion of that but I would think if it's running smoothly you should be able to go a few weeks without a reboot. When I first setup WD I also had crashing and lockup problems and this was on a fairly new machine dedicated to WD with a new install of XP.

I finally narrowed the problem down to the webcam drivers as having a conflict with my USB chipset as being the cause. Investigation found that the Logitech webcam drivers do not work well on computers that use VIA USB chipsets and my computer has VIA USB chipsets in it. I got a new camera, reformated the computer and it has been really stable ever since

[niko]

Mine will run for 3 months or more, I think a monthly restart (in the middle of the month) is probably a good idea though.

W2K might be an option for you, what processor/speed/memory does that older machine have?

[2-Wheeler]

Thanks for the replies. I have a webcam, however it is not using any of the ports on the PC since it is an IP-camera with a built-in webserver. I have it set up to automatically FTP a snapshot directly to a file location on the same PC that runs WD. So I don't think there is a port conflict, but anything is possible.

The only other thing that is running on this PC is the FrontPage webserver with extensions. (The same machine is the actual web server.) So when WD does the FTP thing to move the files, it's actually doing an FTP back to the same machine... Seems odd I know, but I couldn't get it to work correctly by just generating the files directly in the public HTML folder. But perhaps that's another problem to work on another day...

[Weather Display]

re the public folder, you should be able to set the web files location in the webfiles/web page setup?

[2-Wheeler]

re the public folder, you should be able to set the web files location in the webfiles/web page setup?

Thanks, I'll try that again. I suspect I did it wrong. Is there a thread or a Wiki that can guide me through that?

Here's an update on the crash problem:  I loaded the 33f version last night and changed the com port setting to an used port (I'm using HeavyWeather which is using Com-2). But 6 hours later it crashed again. 

Here's the entry from the program error log:

Invalid data type for 'Bias'
win 98 re try of time zone
Invalid data type for 'ActiveTimeBias'
win 98 re try of time zone
Invalid data type for 'Bias'
win 98 re try of time zone
Invalid data type for 'ActiveTimeBias'
win 98 re try of time zone

[Weather Display]

thats the look up in the registry for the time zone and daylight saving mode
on win98 it does a retry becasuse win98 stores it differently
upgrading from win98 would solve that
but strange as i dont think that has affected other win98 users

maybe that was not the actual crash point?
did the time entry match the crash time?
maybe try running the debug version, which will produce a file called WeatherD.elf, which you can email to me

[2-Wheeler]

Update:  I've moved everything over to a brand new machine running XP-pro and loaded the 10.33h version. The good news is it has been running for almost 24 hours now without a crash   

However, when I examine the logs, I found this entry in the programerrorlog.txt file:
Normal daily resetting wind/temperature daily value , day: 12
Above error or program log occurred at :12:00:00 AM 03/12/06
Normal daily resetting rain daily value , day: 12
Above error or program log occurred at :12:00:00 AM 03/12/06
ERROR: Out of system resources at time/date 12:20:03 AM 03/12/06
Above error or program log occurred at :12:20:03 AM 03/12/06
ERROR: Out of system resources at time/date 12:40:03 AM 03/12/06
Above error or program log occurred at :12:40:03 AM 03/12/06

While it didn't crash, the out of system resource indication seems serious. Is there anything I can do to prevent this?

I also noticed that if I view the CPU usage in the Task Manager, WD frequently pegs the graph at 100%.  Is that normal?

Update: Same errors again last night in the log, between midnight and 10 after.

[2-Wheeler]

Brian,
I've just sent the files to you by email.

Thanks,
David (2-Wheeler)

[Weather Display]

ah, i know who that was from now...

your programerrorlog.txt is getting a bit long in the tooth...try deleting that, so you know what is the latest errors
the detailed error logs from the debug version refer to the custom screen 2 generation....and a out of memory error with that...
try disabling and stopping the custom screen generation/upload/update...


ps, having email problems...they are not downloading to OUTLOOK...from the mail server (sometimes a few will)