Followed Solar Guppy's suggestion and connected my 7 inverters to my PC using two Pairs per inverter through an edgeport/8. But the best spare computer I had was a 500 Mhz Pentium III with 192 Meg of ram running 98. I hoped that the hardware requirements were over stated, and I used it. By using an old PC I was able to dedicate it to the task. It worked great,well almost. I brought up 7 copies of GT-view one at a time(I sometimes got insufficient memory messages but if I waited a little before bringing up the next one the problem didn't happen),setting each copy of GT-View to a different com port with output to a different log file. For the month of October the system worked great, the Event Viewer complained about a "critical resource shortage" (Ram) but it still worked.

Last weekend I decided to improve the system. I found some PC100 ram in another old PC and upgraded to 256 Meg and the memory problems went away. Then I decided to make another improvement, Upgrade to XP (big mistake). When the upgrade was complete,I brought up 1 copy of GT-View, it came up fine (quicker than usual)but after a couple of minutes the numbers in the GT-View window went to zero and stayed there. Every time I reloaded GT-View it would work fine for a couple of minutes then stop. My original take on this was that the PC is not fast enough to read the serial ports in a timely manor, but it could also be that XP takes to long to update the screen. Until I solve this problem I am using the hard drives from the 98 system in a 350 Mhz Pentium II with 256 Meg of ram PC. System is very slow had problems keeping the screen refreshed(I had to change the capture rate from 1 sec to 10 sec)but it seems to keep the log files up to date(which is what I am interested in). If you have any insites into what is going on I'd apperciate it.

Jim

Hi Jim.

I've replied to this before and nothing has changed.


Your display issues are most likely the graphics hardware in your old PC combined with the slow CPU can't do squat performance wise.

Windows XP is VERY GUI and memory intensive, one thing to try, is right click on the "my computer" icon and select advance-> perfromance->settings and under visual Effects select custom and turn every thing off.

Also make sure all unessary tasks are disabled.

Bottom line is you need a PC that was made this decade
, you can get dells for under 200 bucks from the outlet store, I got one two weeks ago for 184.00 buck, 2.4 ghz celeron complete.
Just keep checking

Sorry about that, my last post was the old one. Here is the new one with additional information. It has evidence that it is not just lack of CPU power and memory problem.

Well I have been continuing to slowly work on my problem since I last Posted. First I'll define the problem: Copies of GT-View (I need to run 7) go dead and need to be restarted, by dead I mean the numbers on the display go to zero except for Peak AC, Online Today and Whr Today which just stop changing but the copy remains Online. With 98 four copies would keep running and three would die. I upped the memory to 512Meg and the processor to 800 MHz. with no effect. I needed to get to XP, so I could see what was going on. But under XP I couldn't keep even one copy running, So I took an old Celeron PC and put that 500 MHz PIII in it. This machine has 3 real serial ports and I off loaded three of my inverters to it. I run three copies of GT-View on this machine, and they run great ( they never die). Mean while back on the 98 PC,I expected all four remaining copies to stay running, but no way, now two run and two fail. So I moved one to the local serial port and now it works great. This appears to be an edgeport problem. I switched to my XP system, and installed the latest drivers, no help. sometimes I can get one or two up but never all three. Read The Edgeport Manual, found bit setting on the edgeport for Fast Reads, Fast Writes, and Ignore Flush, and others. I turned these three on and it helped. I can get all three copies up with a struggle(sometimes I have to start one or two of them several times), but on good days they will stay up for the day.
As a former programmer I can't imagine that a simle task like reading data from a serial port requires as much horsepower and memory as you suggest. When I run the performance monitor on both of my systems, it shows that the three copies of GT-view on the one PC and four copies on the other are using less than 5% of the CPU and about 100 MB of ram. If I am watching when one of the GT-View's dies I notice no change in the monitor. When I close the one that has died CPU pegs to 100% for a second and sometimes another copy will die. Starting a GT-View takes CPU to 50% or 60% Memory stays in the between 100 and 130 MB. I have installed the Serial port trace you suggested in another post and logged a dead GT-View and a running one. The dead one is using the serial port and getting responses but I see only three commands: TIME? MEASENGYSYS? and RECTIME? repeated many times. Where as the one that is running has a number of other commands that look like they are transfering data. I am not sure if it is a problem with GT-View or the Edgeport. What do I do next?

Thanks,
Jim

Jim has been provided a Beta copy of GT-View 1.8, one of the features with this release is the timing has been relaxed when the fastpc mode is unchecked.

Jim now has a single 500 MHz pc monitoring all 7 of his GT inverters. I have submitted for release the GT-View 1.8 to Xantrex for quality control verification and release.

In the mean time, if there is a customer that is experiencing issues using PC's that are below the stated 1Ghz required minimum, contact me thru the www.solar-guppy.com site and I can provided a beta copy until GT-View 1.8 is posted by Xantrex