Mach3 Driver Test not working

[Beefy]

Bought three PCs and am onto my 2nd one formatting hard drive, installing XP in Standard PC Mode, optimising XP, etc.

First computer everything installed great and ran Mach driver test at 100 khz and great.

2nd computer - all install files are the same but this time the Mach driver test does nothing. Well it goes through the initialisation then finally says system is under Mach control but there is no test line in the graph area.

Readings are:
CPU Mhz: 3001
Shortest time 33674.794
Longest time 33674.794
Apic Timing Constant 50
Interrupt Used 0
Max variation 0
Average Int 33674.794
Longest Int 0

I re-installed mach after uninstalling the parallel port driver in Device Manager but get the same results.

Installed Machs Special Driver and the driver test seems to work except instead of a straight line I get a black block up to where the line should be and this black block has evenly spaced spikes coming from the top and the bottom.

Did the vital re-boot after Mach installation and the Special Driver installation.

So far I,ve had only one PC out of four where everything has installed and worked without any issues. Seems to be an element of luck involved with what pc works and which one doesn't.

[ger21]

Are you running it at 25Khz?

[Beefy]

Yes, but I also tried 100 khz and got the same results.

I've also came to realise something else. Everytime I've installed Mach a window pops up at the end of the installation to tell you it is going to do the re-boot. This did not happen on this computer so I had to do the re-boot manually after the installation. It's the very same installation file I've used on the other computers so something funny is happening. I'll copy a fresh install file to the hard disk and try that. If that doesn't work I'll format the hard drive again and start from scratch.

[ger21]

Very few machines can run Mach3 at 100Khz. You should always start at 25Khz and work your way up if you need to.

What kind of processor is this? I'm guessing there are some settings in the bios that may need to be disabled.

[Beefy]

It's a p4, 3 Ghz, 1G ram, LGA 775 motherboard.

I wish the bios settings weren't so much of a black box affair to us mere mortals. I know some of the basics like the parallel port mode or the boot sequence setting but a lot of the other settings are way over my head.

[ger21]

I would disable anything that you don't need, like sound, and any ports you're not using.

[Beefy]

OK thanks Gerry, I'll give that a shot.

Keith.

[jrobson]

Hi

I posted this in the machsupport forum, if you want to give it a go. Try installing the trial of keyshot from KeyShot - Simple, fast, amazing rendering software for your 3D data., start keyshot then run your driver test and see how it performs at 100khz.

On my notebook it makes all the difference and I don't know why, keyshot loads the cpu due to the realtime rendering, it's worth a shot to see if this works elsewhere or is just an anomaly.