Random errors and crashes V10.04 LDZA on Vista

[winsbury]

We are having frustrating troubles with a V10 site with around 3000 products running on Vista:

• Actinic randomly crashes requiring a restart,
• Variables randomly dissapear from Product Details sections requiring a restart,
• Products with components randomly fail to display the size/colour selections on the live site even though they show perfectly on the preview. Reuploading or refreshing the site will fix some products but reintroduce the fault on others.

All these seem entirely random as to which products are affected or which action will cause a crash, as far as I can tell the access .mdb file itself remains uncorrupted.

I have moved the site to an old XP laptop and it now loads cleanly every time but it is unacceptably slow.

Both machines have 4Gb ram but I 'feel' the problem is somehow related to Vista memory. Vista has no less than 1.3Gb physical memory used during upload whereas XP has less than 500Mb. Turning on the 3Gb switch for Vista made no noticable difference.

Any ideas what is causing the issues on Vista ?
Will Windows 7 solve these problems without introducing any more showstoppers ?

Any help or advice gratefully received.

[Mike Hughes]

The problems you're suffering strike me as possibly being due a number of different problems.

The very first thing I'd do with any kind of problems that might relate to the database would be a 'compact and repair database'.

I'd also run a memory checker on the PC to make sure you don't have a faulty memory module. I had one in a recent PC and it took me quite a while to correctly identify the problem.

I think Vista is probably the worst ever MS operating system and terms of performance and reliability so that's the first thing I'd change. You might want to consider getting a new PC to go along with that but if it's otherwise fine in terms of performance then you could always try increasing the amount of RAM later if necessary.

Mike

[winsbury]

Hi Mike,

thanks for suggestions and totally agree with your comment about Vista though perhaps ME was also a contender for the worst MS system if your memory is as long as mine

Memory test - good idea, I haven't run one in a while so will try that although should point out that nothing else exhibits any problems and this is a heavily used machine so am doubtful that's the cause.

I have already tried:

• compact/repair,
• normal restore
• complete reinstallation and restore site from backup,
• complete reinstallation and restore from hierarchical export.

This last one seemed successful for a while but took a lot of manual editing to get the right templates & defaults reinstated and after all that within a couple of days was exhibiting the same symptoms.

Im coming to the conclusion that buying a Windows 7 machine is the best way forward. I dont think I can run Actinic V10 on Windows 10 as I believe Internet Explorer versions are incompatible.

[Mike Hughes]

totally agree with your comment about Vista though perhaps ME was also a contender for the worst MS system if your memory is as long as mine

I go back as far as Windows 3.0 on my own PCs which is a scary thought (25 years). Fortunately I think I've managed to avoid the worst of the turkeys such as ME. I went from Win 98 to XP and then to Windows 7. I only came across Vista on a laptop I had which was slow and rarely used.

EDIT: Deleted a paragraph that was irrelevant. Sellerdeck V10 works fine with Windows 7. No idea about with Windows 10.

Mike

[winsbury]

Ah well if we're into reminiscing I suspect we have overlapping experiences - my own started over 33 years ago with a paper tape booting motorola 6800 based micro computer that we could only code with low level machine code, moved on to RSX11M+ then VMS before the heady world of DOS then Windows. Things have certainly come a long way since then but are every bit as frustrating when they don't work.

Boy, that me me feel old.

[Mike Hughes]

Very similar experiences from the sound of it. I think I'll leave the reminiscing there before we start to feel even older.

Mike