Mark Band,
We've been using our ABI 377 for almost a year and have problems with
it responding as well. When I have asked tech support about the
problems, they have said to reinstall the firmware, but that hasn't
helped much. I have found that the status window is very helpful. If
we wait until that window catches up with the actual status of the
machine, we can successfully give the machine commands. Also, if we
look at the status window when we start a run, I have found that the
time left in the run can sometimes be wrong (i.e., the pre-run is for
one hour, and at the beginning of the run it only has twenty minutes
remaining). These runs will terminate prematurely if they are not
cancelled and restarted. I have not found this to happen in the run
itself, but only in the pre-run, which is not very critical and the
machine is not unsupervised.
I've had my runs crash in the middle as well, but usually only if I'm
running another application at the same time. I should have plenty of
RAM to run several programs at once, but while the machine is
collecting data, I seem to crash every other day. I almost always
restart successfully, but I usually lose whatever I am working on
outside of the collection. I haven't ever crashed during an
unsupervised run - no one is working on the computer and running any
outside applications.
Hope my experience can help!!
Jerrilyn Pederson
NMSU Cotton Genetics Lab
Las Cruces, NM