Machsupport Forum
Mach Discussion => General Mach Discussion => Topic started by: tony_m on April 20, 2016, 03:55:41 PM
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Hi
I have been running Mach3 for my milling machine for some time under XP and my old computer stopped working. So I have purchased a second hand desktop computer also running XP. I installed Mach 3, rebooted as per the manual and loaded my licence and also loaded the profile I used to use on the previous computer. (luckily I had a backup of the profile)
All works fine for about 10 seconds and then my drive motors go into a very rough mode and make a grumbling noise. If I reboot the computer and try again then the same thing happens. If I just shut down Mach 3 and try again then it dosnt even give me the 10 seconds of smooth running.
I suspect it is a pulse rate problem but I don't know what to do about it. My kernel speed is set to 25000hz and I haven't ever changed that.
Here is what I have done.
I ran the driver test.exe program and this tells me that the system is pulsing too fast and then too slow and the Pulses per Second value in the box at the top of the screen is fluctuating between 2000 and 6000 pulses per second. I also have a lathe controlled by Mach 3 on another computer and I ran the driver test.exe on that computer and it was steady at 25000. (Incidentally if I plug my mill into the computer I usually use to control my lathe and use the mill profile it all works fine so I am fairly sure it is the computer and not the Mach 3 configuration I am using)
So I read the manual and saw that there is an option to revert the computer to use the older i8529 interrupt driver so I ran special driver.bat to do this without success. I then ran OriginalDriver.bat to put it back to the standard driver. I rebooted after doing each of these steps but no luck.
I then loaded the Mach3 driver manually as per 2.4.2 in the Mach3 manual and rebooted but also no success.
I have reloaded Mach3 completely three times to have the install program auto install the drivers and rebooted each time but the problem persists.
Any ideas or should I buy another computer.
Cheers
tony
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Many computer suffer from the on board video card.
Try turning off the tool path display and see if that helps.
If you go to the computer section here and follow the
guides to clean up the OS that might help.
Sounds like some software is trying to run while you are
running Mach3.
I have a old dell optiplex and it will run Mach3 fine.
More info on your computer and version of Mach3
would be helpful.
olf20 / Bob
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Try changing windows from ACPI mode to Standard mode. This may require a re-install.
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Found the doc.
ftp://machsupport.com/Extra%20Information/XP_Optimization_Guide.txt
olf20 / Bob
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Thanks to both Gerry and Bob for your replays.
Bob - I couldn't make the link to the XP optimisation guide work, but I googled and found http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php?topic=6346.0;wap2 which looks like the same thing. I applied all of the recommendations and the system works fine now. Pulse rate is stable and the driver test program is now saying all is OK.
Gerry - Your suggestion of changing from ACPI to standard mode was contained within the various changes in the link I found.
Back up and running now and in production again. I am not sure which of the steps in the process was the critical one but it has certainly worked.
Many thanks again to you both.
Tony
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Glad you got it going! Even though you don't know what one
thing fixed, you learned!
Welcome to CNC.
olf20 / Bob