Hello all, I've been runing Mach3 for about a month now and it's been sporadically freezing up my system.
Running a stand alone desktop, all screensavers etc are off, no wifi or internet.
It will run all day without a problem, but with Mach3 running it will freeze, not every time but it's becomming more common, last night it froze whilst running a job.
the system becomes completely frozen, switching the controller off makes no difference and I cant even Ctrl Alt Del to get it to come back.
it tends to happen when first loading my mill, but will happen at any point.

Dell Dimension 2400
Pentium 4 2.4Ghz
512MB Ram


any ideas?

Thanks in advance

Firs thing I would do is look at the BIOS and see what the voltages and temperatures are. I would also look at the motherboard itself to see if any capacitors seem to be bulging or leaking.
If all above looks ok then open Mach and look on the diagnostics page and see what the Time in Int is and what the Frequency says.
I presume you are using the parallel port, if so what do you have the kernel set to in Mach.

Hood

Hi, The board looks ok, I cleaned it all out yesterday and had a good look at it. I didn't think to check the temps though so I'll have a look at that.
Yes I'm running on the parallel port, kernal speed is set to 35,000 and the time int is running between 4.1 and 5.8
the driver test runs fine and shows the system as excellent, with 34800PPS
Thanks for helping

James

Core temps are all good sitting at 28deg C

Have a look at CPU useage and see how that looks.
Hood

CPU is 0-2% when Idle 27-30% running a cut.
james

All sounds fine, did you look at the voltages to see if they are in spec?
Hood

Hi Hood
I've just been through all the BIOS and it's not showing me the voltages, I've had he machine form new and it's not been overclocked so would suspect ther're fine. will see if I can find some software to confirm them though.
James

Found them, sitting at 2.5V which apparently is normal.

The voltages should be in the BIOS somewhere, probably under PC Health or something like that. There will be a range of voltages, 12v 7v, 5v, 3.3v etc.

If your power supply is dodgy they could be way out of whack making the motherboards life pretty hard.

Hood