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BobLfoot

FactoryTalk View Studio Machine Edition V6 - a rant - a solution

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I just spent the past 24 working hours over 4 days trying to upgrade a working V5.10 FactoryTalk Studio Machine Edition PC to Version 6.00. This has been a colossal night mare to date and at present the system hangs loading services every time I try and open a demo project. And by this I mean it will stay as pictured for 16 plus hours and never error, never move on. I have repaired, removed, reinstalled and searched knowledgbase at RA till I am crosseyed. I have four machines hitting the floor this week with PV1500Pluses and need V6 to support them. Hopefully my local RA Vendor tech Support has more of an answer than search the KB today.

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It is great when they release new versions with bugs. Mine has a few glitches that are little annoyances, but the fun one is in the tag editor. If I click on a button or object to assign a tag in any way, connection, visibility, read ect...once the tag window is open, you see the project name with the little icon and two screens. If you have recently changed the project and want to update, usually you would hit the refresh all folders, I get a second instance of the icon. Each will expand to the full tree with offline online ect, but NONE have the new tags. Only way to update is to reboot whole machine. Sucks when you think, hey I need this button and a funcion to make it work and then you have to go through all that for something that should take five minutes.

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Bob, Did you eventually get it working? I remember something similar, RA wanted you to export and import every project to get functional. I believe the majority of my problems were in initial setup of Enteprise, maybe check there. Rick

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I'll skip the drama and the history and tell you what you probably already suspected: Give up. I don't mean give up on RA and PanelView Plus, even though you feel like it right now. Give up on performing a v5.0 to v6.0 upgrade. Get an XP Professional install disc, get VMWare Workstation, and build a clean virtual machine with SP2 or SP3 on it. Install ONLY FactoryTalk Service Platform, FactoryTalk Activation Manager, and FactoryTalk View 6.10. Don't try to install v5.0, or 6.0. I just went through this with a co-worker and after a great deal of gnashing of teeth and protestations of "but it should work ! Why won't it work !" he acceded and let me copy our master VM onto his machine. His breathing returned to normal, the PanelView accepted a download, and the machine is in a container at the port now. I don't worry about FactoryTalk View upgrades anymore because I refuse to attempt them. It's a clean install to bare metal, or a virtual machine, or I'm not going to do it. My time is so expensive now that the cost of VMWare or a hard drive is a fraction of the cost of a day of time. Don't fall for the sunk cost fallacy: cut your losses, get VMWare and a fresh OS, and do it from scratch.

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Ken - Thanks for the INFO. Must be nice to work where they allow you to use VMWare or VirtualBox. What your post means to me is I will be spending another 24 hours getting a fresh image laid down on my laptop followed by reinstall of all my Rockwell Software just to get this new version of FT View operational. Not what I wanted to hear, but what I half expected.

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I can't say why but one final search of the RA Knowledgebase turned up two (2) previously overlooked responses which solved this issue. http://rockwellautomation.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/65266 http://rockwellautomation.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/68481 Bottom Line FactoryTalk View was not given enough memory to play with and couldn't even squawk that the problem was that.

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Thanks Bob. Once again you saved me tons of time looking. Keep doing what you do.

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I can't access those links. Is there any way you can help summarize what the issue was and how to fix it without breaking any rules here? Thanks.

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The first one discusses a long list of Windows files that may not be correctly registered. You could ask your A/B rep to get the utility contained in that link. But the 2nd one has helped me with the same issue in 5.1 on my WinXP Pro 32 bit machine. It explains that you are running out of so called desktop heap. FTView takes lotsa desktop heap apparently, along with the increase in alcohol consumption and patience testing it requres, it needs double the default desktop heap. :banghead: They recommend doubling it to 1024. http://support.micro....com/?id=184802 Edited by OkiePC

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Dude, you bought Rockwell software. Just because it costs thousands of dollars doesn't mean it will actually work.
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I'll add one more "gotcha" to the list for FT View 6.1 to hopefully save somebody some greif. My perfectly working FT View Install recently refused to open the 6.1.apa file supplied by one of our machine builders. IT would open his 6.1.mer just fine and even reverse engineerr from it. Turns out RA releases routine Patch Kits for FT View that have to be downloaded and isntalled. Once I did this the vendors 6.1.apa would open on my system. This despite RA CUrrent Updater running on my system daily, which I thought was supposed to keep FT View patched. Oh Well there I go thinking that you get the best when you pay the most.

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You guys are the best. Got the same problem and increased my desktop heap. Now its working fine. For all with the same problem: I changed HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems\Windows from %SystemRoot%\system32\csrss.exe ObjectDirectory=\Windows SharedSection=1024,3072,512 Windows=On SubSystemType=Windows ServerDll=basesrv,1 ServerDll=winsrv:UserServerDllInitialization,3 ServerDll=winsrv:ConServerDllInitialization,2 ProfileControl=Off MaxRequestThreads=16 to %SystemRoot%\system32\csrss.exe ObjectDirectory=\Windows SharedSection=1024,3072,1024 Windows=On SubSystemType=Windows ServerDll=basesrv,1 ServerDll=winsrv:UserServerDllInitialization,3 ServerDll=winsrv:ConServerDllInitialization,2 ProfileControl=Off MaxRequestThreads=16 Best regards, crawler009 Edited by crawler009

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Now that you have FcTMeViewStudio 6.10 plus patches running (hopefully in a virtual machine) make a restore point, take a snapshot, image...but first you may want to check for one more bug if you work with the PV600+ on a desktop with a big monitor: If you are editing a PV600+ sized window and zoom in and edit objects, weird things may happen to them like they disappear to the left of the display where you barely see the right most "handles" but can't quite grab them or normal buttons become gigantic (bigger than the whole screen). http://www.plctalk.n...ead.php?t=75188 Even with the latest Patch Roll Up dated well after the fix for the above problem, I had to apply that patch manually anyway, but it did work. I don't think the problem with zooming occurs with other target display sizes, so if you don't use the 600+ you can probably skip it. Edited by OkiePC

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Okie I can only wish my IS Department thought enough of us to give us Virtuals and Snapshot / imaging capability. I can't even get them to create a default deploy image for anything other than a receptionist PC image. I ahve to spend 24 hours installing RA Stuff every time a laptop/desktop ages out of their system and they repalce with newe/shiny. But I rant and digress from the topic. Your suggestion is a good one for those who can.

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I mainly wanted to point out that patch for the zooming issue. As for virtualization, I had to figure it out with help from forums, and ended up getting Windows Virtual PC to work okay. My IT department uses Microsoft HyperV for virtualization because it comes with a shedload of free liceneses. For that reason they didn't want to let us use VMWare, but they did say if I couldn't make the (free) Virtual PC or HyperV to work they would come up with a WinXP license and allow me to download and run VMWare If you have Windows 7 Pro, you can run virtual PC without having to come up with a WinXP license for it. And, if you decide to give this a try, I can share what I learned which may be helpful... I really hope that we are able to eliminate our dependence of FactoryBalk altogether some time soon. 100% of our A/B hardware HMIs are now obsolete and I am trying to go Red Lion with those, and our half dozen scada systems can migrate to Ignition.

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Please keep the rest of us in your loops as for any issues you run into with the conversion to Red Lion!

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Dude, are you really in China? This is my ole bud from the tread lines right?

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Then FTView just sits there when I open it. it doesn't even get to the status bar like yours. This is after upgrading to RSLinx Enterprise, where I had RSLinx classic before. Can you tell me the name of the utility that you mentioned was in the link? Thanks Edited by strantor

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