Hi. I stupidly posted this question before with the subject Driver gets lost, leading some to believe I was posting a joke or a tale about my wife's driving,
What I meant is why does the Mach3 driver refuse to wake up? I put a shortcut on my desktop to the system properties, where I can find the Mach3 driver under
the device manager. From there you can right click - disable, and then right click- enable. This works, but is a pita. I want to be able to leave sleep mode active,
as I'm often doing other things while the machine is milling.
Anyway, thanks for any advice.

MACH3 was NEVER designed to run with sleep mode active. You cannot dependably run MACH3 with sleepmode active. To use MACH3 turn sleep mode OFF.

How do you think your CAR would react to a sleep mode while you were driving(;-)

Hope that helps, (;-) TP

I didn't mean I expect Mach3 to sleep and later wake up part way through a milling routine. I meant, after a routine is finished, which normally for me, is only 10-15 min long, why can't the computer enter sleep mode, and when I'm ready to run another routine, wake up with Mach3 ready to go.
Whyyyyy? This is freaking me out, it should be fairly simple, but maybe I'm fairly simple.
Thanks

Simply because it can't. 

(;-) TP

Sleep mode is really difficult for drivers to handle properly, they tend to come back up in somewhat random order, and often dependencies that were resolved in the initial startup aren't properly resolved exiting sleep.
Lots of drivers have this issue, it's not even all that uncommon for machines not to come out of sleep at all.

There is nothing easy about developing a working kernel level device driver for windows, and while the mach driver isn't perfect it does work.

Ok, thanks to all.

We have a similar issue of Mach3 stopping to send data to the machine servodrives, after machine was not working for a while, some 20-30min. Pc is not in a sleep mode, this has been disabled. When the operator gets back to it, he can try to do MDI or jog, but machine is not reacting.
How can one disable a drive sleep mode, if there is such thing in Mach3?
Thanks for any advice.

Hi Michael,

how are you, last time we talked was at the manufacturing show.

I don't specifically know the answer to your question but I've never had that problem after leaving my machine just "sitting there" for some time.

All I can say is a go absolutely crazy with disabling anything I can possibly think of, that is not necessary for Mach3. Anything to do with power saving, screen power down, screen savers. I go through all Windows services and disable anything I THINK is not needed. I un-install any built in XP applications like Internet Explorer, etc

I even look in the BIOS and see if there's anything I can disable there, like networking, sound, etc.

When installing XP I go through the XP optimisation guide for Mach3 and install in "Standard PC" mode.

After all that if I don't get a fantastic driver test without glitches, or if I have any other issues, I try a different PC. I've found some PCs just don't work as good with Mach3.

Keith.

Hi Keith
This I find a strange behaviour. It is about 8 machines which I am involved with but I have not seen this before. As you are suggesting mabe we should look at changing the pc. But another thought we had, with Mark, who is an expert on the servdrives, that they also could have a sleep mode. These are from Busselato, the Italian routers which we are involved with few customers who get them at low cost and then we help to retrofit them with a pc and Mach3. We will have to more consistently make a notes when this happens, under what conditions, to come to some conclusions and then hopefully find the solution. If you have a time and like to call me for a chat, my number is 02 9636 2873 or 0437 783 958.
Best regards
Michael Haber

Go into Windows system settings ---> device manager, open the device you are using ---> then click the "power management" tab and make sure "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" is not checked.