PI Ripley 1195 Crashes on Win 7

[Huw_Orwig]

I'm fairly new to PI, and recently upgraded from 1123 to 1195, now it repeatedly falls over, goes to a "stopped responding" message, and then I have to re-start the PC to get anywhere. It seems to be happening on SubframeSelector and StarAlign, but might be other processes as well. I'm on Win7Pro, 16Gig Ram, 8 core PC and Nvidia fx3700 graphics card. No other software is running at the same time and the anti virus is disabled.
Rolled back to 1123, now seems to work.
Don't really want to move from Win 7 to 10, should I just stay with 1123?


Huw

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Huw,

Is this machine a Dell or AlienWare computer? If yes, take a look at this thread for probable causes of this problem and its solution.

Let me know if this helps.

[Huw_Orwig]

Thanks Juan, no, the machine is an HP XW8600, Win 7 installed, with no HP software remaining
Huw

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Huw,

I need more information to look for possible causes of this problem. This does not happen under normal conditions; in fact a lot of users work with PixInsight on Windows 7 without problems. That said, please note that Windows 7 is no longer an officially supported platform.

I'd need a more in depth description of the exact issues (which processes, what images, etc) and probably a minimal data set where the same problems can be reproduced consistently.

[Huw_Orwig]

Thanks Juan, I've been doing more investigation of the problem.
I started with re-installing Pixinsight 1195, with all the latest updates.
My imaging camera is a Starlight Express SXVR-H35, so image dimensions of 4008 x 2672  pixels.
ImageCalibration, and ImageIntegration work fine, but SubFrameSelector is giving problems. If I load binned subs, everything is fine, it will analyse 60+ subs happily. However, un-binned subs cause problems.
A short run (10 to 20) of full res subs usually works fine, but more subs (40 or so) cause "PCL FITS Format Support" errors, "Error reading data buffer from file"

On re-running the same sequence of subs, it will stop on a different file, running a shorter set of subs, including the ones it has problems with causes no problems.
Once the error message is up, it locks everything up, even the mouse, and occasionally the PI window will go transparent, or even the whole screen go black, and I have to do a hard re-boot.
Thinking it was to do with the number of stars detected, (my image are widefield, with 18-20,000 stars detected) I've tried running SubFrameSelector on a sequence of 40 full res darks, but the same happened
ImageRegistration causes similar problems, with the system locking up totally on reading some images, again randomly.
These symptoms are not exactly the same as when it was happening on 1195 before I went back to 1123. Then, the PI screen would grey out and no error messages were seen.

I hope this is of some help

XXX EDIT XXX

I was not correct that ImageIntegration worked, I went to prepare some master control frames from a QSI6120, a stack of 40 binned bias frames was OK, but 40 un binned frames caused the same file read error as above.

XX EDIT 2XXX
I can confirm that this is machine specific, have installed PI on my laptop, there are no problems with the same data causing issues on the original system


Huw

[Huw_Orwig]

I've now done a clean re-install of Windows 7 on the original machine, and the total system freezes have gone away, however, on the full rez subs, the system still gives momentary "not responding" warnings on StarDectector, but recovers and continues.
Huw

[Juan Conejero]

Glad to know the problem is solved. Small unresponsive states working with large images are normal in some intensive tasks.