Perhaps I should be more precise.
We have 5 mass spectrometers; all run Isodat 2.0 SP 2.63
Four of them use the Fibreline card to communicate with the IRMS and one is an ISA GPIB card on a clone computer. Three of them have Dell computers except the one I mentioned that was replaced with a clone (DUO processor) 3 months ago.

The Dell was the one with the leaking capacitors where the motherboard, processor, RAM and the power supply were all replaced, in time, to find the reason for it not working with Isodat or the Fibreline card.  Before the motherboard meltdown it ran without problems for almost three years (2 months left of the Dell 3 year warranty).  It is now my desktop computer and has been running flawlessly for 3 months.  All mass spectrometers running Isodat have very few problems and we rarely need to do anything to the systems (reboot or other).  All are running Norton Anti-Virus (Version 10.0.5000) and are ON and OFF the internet for updates (Lab intranet).  The other 3 computers with P4 @2.8GHz, I mentioned in my first posting, are in other labs running different analytical instruments (No IRMS in those labs).

However, there is one thing to know.  Microsoft's automatic UPDATE has a flaw that brings, at times, the computer down to a crawl.  This is from a posting on our internal IT list-serve:
"Some systems, specially the older ones, have had the svchost process responsible for networked services run at 99 percent CPU usage for a while. I tracked down the issue to the Automatic Updates service." 

You can find information on this at: 
http://swigartconsulting.blogs.com/tech_blender/2006/07/windows_update_.html

Again from the IT posting: "I just try these procedures and it works fine, but... you need to re-start the pc after re-registering the DLL's, before running net stop WuAuServ`"

I strongly recommend turning OFF the automatic Windows update and doing them manually once in awhile.  Since I normally have all my machines on the lab Intranet, this is my normal setting for all instrumentation computers and thus I have not seen this behaviour from Windows update.

Gilles


Gilles St-Jean
Chercheur / Research Scientist
Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Sciences de la Terre / Earth Sciences
140 Louis Pasteur, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5
Tel: 1-613-562-5800 xt 6830 (Bureau / Office)
                    xt 6839 (Bureau / Office Lab)
                    xt 6836 (IRMS lab)
Téléc. / Fax: 1-613-562-5192
Courriel / E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Toile / Web: www.isotope.uottawa.ca


-----Message d'origine-----
De : Stable Isotope Geochemistry [mailto:[log in to unmask]] De la part de J T Hill
Envoyé : 4 mai 2007 06:05
À : [log in to unmask]
Objet : Re: [ISOGEOCHEM] Strange computer behaviour

Hello Gilles

Is your system connected to the Internet? If so, 
we had a similar problem on a MAT-253 with a Dell 
Optiplex whilst acquiring data in ISODAT. The 
system would crash during acquisition for no apparent reason.
The cause was that the anti-virus software 
operating in the background continually looks for 
updates etc. This created conflict with the 
acquisition process so we disconnected the system 
from the network and it then started working OK.

I hope this helps,

Regards

John Hill

At 19:04 03/05/2007, you wrote:
>Hi all
>I have a question that has to do with computer 
>control of instruments.  Here is what I have noticed from others:
>- When the computer is running normal stuff 
>(Office, drawing software etc) it is working flawlessly.
>- When it is running data acquisition software 
>(Isodat, and others) it seems to either drop 
>(lose) information or completely freeze or crash.
>
>I have found this on 4 different systems (3 Dell 
>Optiplex (2 different models) and one home built 
>clone) running Win XP SP1 & SP2.  However they 
>all have one thing in common... A Pentium 4 
>running at 2.8GHz.  RAM varies from 512 MB to 1 GB.
>
>My question is this, are there others out there 
>that may have weird behaviour that MAY be linked 
>to this particular Pentium processor?  Keep in mind it may be a coincidence.
>
>Gilles
>
>Gilles St-Jean
>Chercheur / Research Scientist
>Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
>Sciences de la Terre / Earth Sciences
>140 Louis Pasteur, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5
>Tel: 1-613-562-5800 xt 6830 (Bureau / Office)
>                     xt 6839 (Bureau / Office Lab)
>                     xt 6836 (IRMS lab)
>Téléc. / Fax: 1-613-562-5192
>Courriel / E-mail: [log in to unmask]
>Toile / Web: www.isotope.uottawa.ca

John Hill
Mass Spectrometry Facility
University College London
Chemistry Department
20 Gordon St.
London
WC1H 0AJ

Tel:  020 7679 4605
Fax: 020 7679 7451