Since WD was installed, both my system and WD have crashed several times. One WD crash was probably due to large number of Win/7 auto updates applied on 2/15/2012. That said…
There is no evidence that updates were the cause of the current problems. In the latest instance, the system locked up at approximately 11pm last night. It had to be hard-rebooted to get it running again. WD was in “Hide” mode.
A security scan indicates that there is no malware on the system.
System Info:
WD version: V10.37R Build 10
Weather station type: Davis VP2 with APRS
PC operating system and brief spec: Windows 7/64 on Core i7/920 with 12GB Ram
Is there a WD application log that can provide info?
Regards,
Dan.
p.s. Win7 was installed fresh on this system when the system was built. There have been NO bluescreens, lockups, or other crashing system problems until now.
What AV software are you running and make sure that WD directories are excluded. WD does not like being scanned and it has in the past caused problems like this.
What is happening when you get the crash? What else is running? I’d never let Windows auto update on a PC running WD, always manage updates manually - not that my old W2K system gets many now!!!
Have you enabled any auto-clocking in the BIOS? WD is a very unlikely candidate as the cause of your problems. I’ve had problems on the latest Intel and AMD CPU’s when I’ve tried to use a motherboard BIOS’ auto-(over)clocking, and the problems weren’t worth the bother to sort out. I just disabled the overclocking to obtain a stable system. Just a thought, and YMMV. Motherboard, power supply, RAM are just some of the potential hardware sources of this problem–I would start with MB configuration.
USB data logger?
(you do not say what type of data logger with your davis station)
if a USB one then make sure to download and install the latest slicon labs driver for that
there is a FAQ about how and where etc
This has happened several times. Just recently at 4:45 PM. Except for Outlook and an IE window, nothing was running. While the crash yesterday may have been as a result of the auto-updates, were no updates installed at that time. So I’m pretty sure that auto-updates were not related to to the latest crash.
My system is conservatively overclocked and has been for about 18 months with NO problems - completely stable and not one single glitch. And that’s with all sorts of applications running include SQL Server, Visual Studio 2008 and 2010, Adobe CS5 Production Premium (including Photoshop and Premiere), a bunch other graphics software including Sketchup, Xara Designer Pro, and Adobe Illustrator. And that includes a financial analysis package (AmiBroker/64) that will use 6-8GB of memory and cause the CPUs to max. With all that other software running properly, it’s highly doubtful that the system is a problem.
That is, except for the Davis related drivers. I’m checking that out now.
The data logger is the standard Davis WeatherLink USB. I’m using got Virtual VP to pulling data from the WeatherLink and pumping it to Weather Display (with TCP/IP settings to pump data to VWS and Cumulus if I want to test that software).
Regarding the latest driver, the last entry for a PC is the WeatherLink Utility at: Davis Instruments Support, FAQs and Troubleshooting. It’s dated over three years ago and my Davis system is less than one month old, so I doubt that my drivers are old.
Also, I looked around the Davis site. I found a Knowledge Base, but not a FAQ.
FYI, I checked the “View → Program Event Log”. It’s completely blank. Then I checked the FTP Log. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but I didn’t see any error notices.
I also reinstalled WeatherLink 5.9.3. Then I downloaded and tried to install the “CP210X_USB_SerialConverter_ver2.exe”. This threw an error saying that it could not find the “CP210xManufacturering.dll”, asking me to reinstall “the program” (unspecified).
Regarding the “…latest slicon labs driver…”, there is no mention of that except for a Mac OSX system driver. Is there some other source for this? Got a link?
Hi. It’s hard to believe that a company who makes the preferred, high-quality weather hardware many people would deliver old drivers with their equipment, but I’m becoming a believer. I’m starting to think that their worldview is that their consoles are the primary means of viewing weather data.
My worldview is vastly different - that the sensors, consoles, loggers, and even weather software like WD and Cumulus are just “plumbing” to get weather data to a website for better quality viewing. If there’s a break in the plumbing (like old, poor-quality drivers), then the entire system is broken. My opinion of Davis as a company has taken a nosedive.
Thanks for the headsup and the link. I’ll download the latest driver to see if it fixes the problem.
Thanks for the link. Brian mentioned a FAQ but didn’t say it was a Weather Watch FAQ. I thought he was referring to a Davis website FAQ. I’ll check it out.
I shut down all other apps, including LogMeIn. I also turned off auto-update. The latest updates for Weather Link driver has NOT been installed. It’s been running for 24 hours with no problems. I’ll watch if for a couple days and then install the driver.
I would advise installing the latest drivers anyway as this problem can go away for upto a week or more before re-occuring. Plus there may be something else wrong and by installing the drivers then you’ve eliminated that as possible cause.
Installed new drivers. Still crashing. This is getting to be a very unpleasant experience.
I’ve been working all day so I don’t have time to mess with this now. I’ll need to go through the steps in detail to see what I’ve missed. If necessary, I’ll wipe everything clean and reinstall everything from scratch.
When I get unexplained errors like this one thing I always do is to run a memory diagnostic such as Memtest86 which can thrash memory. Maybe worth a try even if the PC is fairly new as memory can cause such issues.
That would be a good suggestion except that the system has a lot of heavyweight apps on it and has NEVER hiccuped once. I have one app that used almost 100% of the CPU and 8GB of memory every time it ran - about 44 minutes. No problems ever.
you would need to have weatherlink set to have the bulletin mode window visible, ie getting real time LOOP data all the time
to have it stressing the data logger the same
also note that WD does not use the vantage.dll , instead works directly with the data logger
