Hello hello
I popped in to do some tests on the laser cutter last night and the computer kept crashing!! Apparently this is a common problem and can happend mid-job, which is pretty worrying. Some people were of the opinion that it’s a problem with the PC, anyone know a solution?
Cat
x
I think that there are some PC"s in the back . And i have a new lead in the van that you can try and i can bring in a spare laptop and a old OS for you to try .
You do realise that if you fix this that you will become the queen of laser cutting and and will never be able to do anything else ever again Because people will be asking questions from the moment you walk in the door
Haha!
I could do with some help with the software installation - it’s really not my strong point!
I don’t claim to be an expert but i will try to help .
Sorry. I meant to try fix this on Thursday. I’ll have a look on Monday if it’s still screwy.
The original PC worked but was painfully slow.
So consensus is that it’s a hardware problem?
There are some legacy versions of Windows around I think, which can be loaded at least temporarily on another machine. Though we must have a bunch of authentication stickers on those PCs in the back.
Thanks guys!
this is where i encourage members who are not already up to their necks fore manning the construction work (Pete, Dermot and Joe) to lead the fix on this.
which is another way of encouraging Joe, Dermot and Pete to let other members drive the fix on this
borrowing/ sourcing a decent laptop, installing the software (mostly involves hitting enter from my experience) and testing to see if it fixes is not hard, and there are many other members who could help as well
I’ll give it a crack when I’m next in, but I would appreciate some help from somewhere as I seriously don’y know what I’m doing or where to find the disk with the software on!
There are two DVDs in the red box with the cleaning stuff in. And a bunch of PCs in the back 
What’s the connection to the laser ? Is it USB or parallel?
Courty
USB, so nothing crazy needed!
USB
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Catherine, you are now the centre of knowledge for the laser cutter.
Is it wise for Catherine to try it first on a laptop she knows to be in
good working order rather then digging computers out from the back of
the space.
is the machine we have running the laser cutter now a bit geriatric?
Weirdly not, no. It’s just been badly battered by living in a building site. Or it’s running Windows 7 and that’s a bad thing. Or something. I don’t know. I don’t understand computers.
I was told that a laptop is a bad idea because we only have license for one PC to have it, and I think the software MUST work right?
I guess three options?? chime in if you think diff, have other ideas
1: its the PC
2:It’s the software running the laser cutter on our PC
3:It’s the laser cutter
1: most likely scenario listening to speculation, to test this option we can maybe
run task manager and have a look at the performance tab while it does a job
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=windows+task+manager&client=ubuntu&hs=zDE&channel=fs&biw=1920&bih=985&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjM0rud5t7LAhVB7BQKHexLBcgQ_AUIBygB#imgrc=86WtwT1cHVR_bM%3A
it would be good to swap out to a really decent machine as well, but we need to check licence issues there, Tom Lynch often know about these things, is it possible to get a few licences, some kind of site licence? Can we transfer licence from one machine to the next?
Does the software run on Linux? Ubuntu would be leagues better,if not what is our preferred windows OS?
If the CPU and mem usage on the machine is ok, is it likely its still a OS problem?
2: Does the software have an output log? It might have some info
3: We’re assuming its not software issue/hardware issue with the laser cutter itself, but if we rule out all other options then maybe it is
It used to work; yeah. I would use one of the donated HP boxes in the back. Don’t trust any of the SLMS laptops, which really should have been sent to the great laptop bin in the sky many moons ago.
I don’t think there is any licence authentication, though I might be wrong.
If so, the licence is more we shouldnt install on multiple machines rather than can’t, so trying it out on a couple machines until we get something stable is no worry.
It’s definitely not the cutter at fault. JC can crash even when the cutter is turned off.