Hi all--

I'm having problems with jogging that I can't quite understand, so here I am.

I've had the following system, working mostly okay, for several years:

    -- A vanilla desktop PC running Windows XP SP3, with 4GB of memory.
    -- Mach3, Version R3.043.062
    -- Ethernet SmoothStepper
    -- ESS plugin version ESS-M3-170328-u4-f1-H
    -- Gecko G540

I've had occasional problems with inexplicable errors within Mach3, and have tried unsuccessfully to diagnose these through the Mach3 and Warp9 forums.  Recently I've decided that I suspect the PC's Ethernet port as being somehow a little flaky and intermittent, so I have opted to replace the machine with something better.

So, we bought a new computer.  It's a bare-bones Shuttle box; we've put a 4 GHz i3 processor in it, 8 GB of memory, a 250GB SSD, and Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit.  Over the past couple of days we've assembled and initialized this machine, installed Mach3 and the SmoothStepper driver, and installed the same profile as we had been using on the XP machine.  By the way the XP machine is still here for reference, and running mostly fine as before.

Now, I had expected that, once we got the W7 machine running with the same Mach3 profile as the XP machine, that it would behave the same way.  And mostly it does.  But, something's different, and I can't figure out what's wrong.

With the W7 machine, I can load a G-code program and run it, and everything behaves just as it would have on the XP machine.

But, jogging is somehow not right.

We've always used the keyboard numeric keypad arrow keys for jogging.  With the XP machine, pressing just the arrow keys by themselves, the machine will jog at a reduced speed; I think I have this set to 5% of maximum from within the little flyout window that pops in from the right when you press "Tab".  Pressing Shift + arrow keys, the machine will jog at full maximum speed.  And, when pressing control + arrow keys, the machine will jog in 0.001" increments - again an increment that I defined in the "Tab" popup window.

Now on the W7 machine, I remind, we're using the exact same Mach3 profile.  But jogging isn't working the same:  Pressing just the arrow keys by themselves, the machine seems to do nothing; no motion at all.  Pressing Shift + arrow keys, the machine will jog at what seems like the 5% reduced speed.  And when pressing Control + arrow keys, the machine will move in 0.001" increments, same as it should.

Okay so my question: Can anyone explain this situation to me?  It seems clear to me, that there must be some Mach3 parameters that are not stored in the profile, but rather somewhere else.  But I can't figure out where.  And, I can't figure out where to configure the behavior, when pressing the arrow keys with and without the Control and Shift modifiers.

Any help, I would greatly appreciate!

Thanks--

-- Perplexed in Pennsylvania (a.k.a. Dave)

Okay so actually we found the solution to our issue today.  Well it was a dumb thing; this post is just for the benefit of anybody else later on that runs into this situation.

It turned out, that for some reason, our new Windows 7 computer was booting up with "Num Lock" turned on.  So the numeric pad keys did nothing without Shift pressed (since windows was getting numbers instead).  With Shift pressed, the numeric pad keys then I suppose were outputting the codes for the arrow directions, making jog work at slow speed.

Our keyboard has no "Num Lock" light, so there was no easy way to know.  We decided today to start up the Win7 on-screen keyboard to check, and sure enough Num Lock was set.

I know we ran into this issue once before a year or two ago, and it ended up mysteriously fixing itself, without me ever understanding why it happened, or why it got better.

Well maybe I have learned something today!

Thanks again--

--dave