Subject:
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IR Tower and Hyperthreading
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Mon, 5 Jan 2004 13:35:56 GMT
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Viewed:
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889 times
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Hello fellow RCX'ers and programming gurus,
As is usual in the Official Lego MindStorms Forums, following Christmas we
have seen the usual influx of new users sign on with problems and
frustrations. This year the new member list is much, much smaller, but they
appear to be very serious people that actually think before they post. This
year's Most Common Problem Award goes to the Tower and XP Pro.
It appears that when RIS 2.0 was released some of the code was changed and
nothing was tested on the Pro platform. It appears that somewhere in the
drivers for the tower or in the software itself is something that is
causing compatibility issues on some of the newer PC's. So far four or five
users have reported this problem and a very interesting singularity has
become evident that each one of these members confirms: the machines that
are having the problems all have a hyperthreading kernel.
These are all new 2+Ghz PC's (usually Dells, if it makes any difference)
with a HT-enabled kernel and running XP Pro. Each user reports that the
software runs fine but as soon as they try to use the tower the entire PC
hangs, requiring a forcible kill before order can be restored. Obviously
not the most pleasant situation for new users to encounter first thing off
the block. It's obvious why LEGO didn't catch this - hyperthreading
probably wasn't very popular when the 2.0 software was released (and
somebody said something about it only being tested on 98, 2k and ME). Now,
however, everybody has the latest technology and our old software is
incompatible.
So, the reason I'm writing all of this is to ask...have any of you
experienced this problem or run into it before? Have you ever been able to
fix this? Are there options you can recommend (besides using NQC or another
language - remember that these newbies probably need the graphical starting
point)? Is there something these guys can do besides reinstall XP with
hyperthreading disabled?
There are few in our forum that are skilled enough to read the driver code
or debug the problem themselves. That's why I'm asking you all - I know
your skill level is somewhat higher than ours (but don't tell them I said
that. ;) ). I really don't want these good folks to return the whole thing
just because the software doesn't work. I'd really like them to get it
fixed or do a workaround so they can enjoy many long years of bricking.
Perhaps these are future LUGNET'ers. :)
Any help is appreciated. So far LEGO Tech Support hasn't responded to users
emails.
Thanks,
~Mike
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: IR Tower and Hyperthreading
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| (...) Hi Mike, All I can do is to confirm that hyperthreading can cause very subtle bugs. We experienced that lately in our company in an ADSL board driver, a problem appeared when used with high speed HT machines (>= 3GHz). It worked flawlessly on (...) (21 years ago, 5-Jan-04, to lugnet.robotics)
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