APPNOTE: Computer Requirements to run Pronto for Windows

APPNOTE: Computer Requirements to run Pronto for Windows.

Last reviewed: January 27, 2010
Article ID: 051118sab

The information in this article applies to:

Pronto for Windows all versions.

Target Audience.

This article is aimed at:

All Users of Pronto for Windows.

Summary.

Pronto for Windows is the data download and analysis tool for the Ranger, Power Master and Adaptive Store series of data loggers.
This application note details the computer specification required to run Pronto for Windows.

Operating System support.

Windows 7 (see note below)
Windows Vista (see note below)
Windows XP
Windows 2000
Windows NT 4.0 with service pack 6 or later.
Windows Millennium Edition.
Windows 98 se
Windows 98
Windows 95 (see note below)

Pronto for Windows and Windows Vista or Windows 7

Releases 5.64 and later of Pronto for Windows will install and run correctly on Windows Vista or Windows 7.

Releases 5.63 and 5.62 of Pronto for Windows will run correctly on Windows Vista and Windows 7, although the following issues may occur:
1) Pronto for Windows does not have write access to the application directory after installation, This problem can be avoided by installing Pronto for Windows into <C:\Pronto4W> instead of the default <C:\Program Files\Pronto4w>.
2) When Pronto is launched, the message "Failed to update system registry" appears 3 times for which a solution is presented in this knowledge base article: 030804kb_failed_to_update_registry.htm
3) When PmScreen is launched a message either "The OLE class MBServer is not registered on this computer" or "An operation was attempted on a nonexistent network connection" appears for which a solution is presented in this knowledge base article: 041208kb_pmscreen_mbserver_not_registered.htm

Pronto for Windows and Windows 95

Pronto for Windows will run correctly on Windows 95 provided that the following updates are installed:
DCOM95 update (DC95Inst.exe),
Windows Socket 2 update (w95ws2setup.exe),
Dial up networking 1.3 and Winsock2 year 2000 update (y2kvdhcp.exe).
Year 2000 update (w95y2k.exe),
Dial up networking 1.4 update (dun14-95.exe)
A copy of these updates are present on the installation disk for Pronto for Windows revision 5.41 or later.
Alternatively these updates can be downloaded from the Microsoft Windows 95 web site here.

ODBC.

Pronto for Windows uses "Open DataBase Connectivity". Is is recommended that MDAC 2.5 service pack 3 or later is installed.
The installation program for ODBC (mdac_typ.exe) is included on the Pronto installation disk or may be downloaded from the Microsoft web site.

Processor requirements.

Pronto for Windows will run on any computer with a Pentium class processor. A 400 MHz Processor or faster is recommended. Users graphing long multi-channel recordings from a PM7000 will obtain better screen refresh times with a faster processor.

Hard Disk Space.

Installing Pronto for Windows with its help files uses 10 MBytes of disk space.
Each time a Logger is downloaded approximately 5 times the size of the downloaded data from the Logger is used to store the uncompressed data. For example a download from a full PM6000 (which has 4 MBytes of RAM) will consume approximately 20 MBytes of disk space.

Memory requirements.

As a guide a system should provide reasonable graphing performance with the following:
1024 MBytes of RAM if running Windows Vista or Windows 7,
256 MBytes of RAM if running Windows XP,
128 MBytes of RAM if running Windows 2000,
64 MBytes of RAM if running Windows 2000, NT4.0, ME, 98 or 95.

With big download files quite a lot of free memory is required at the point of saving to the project.
Adaptive store data expands to about 5 times the size as it is decoded.
Waveform data and general recording data expand about two times.
During the save of each channel the database drivers duplicate each channel as it is saved.
The worst case would be a very large entirely adaptive store recording with only one channel in it. This would expand 5 times during decode then at the point of saving be duplicated so about 10 times the size of the raw data would be required.

Examples:

A 32 MB PM7000 recording with a single adaptive channel could require 340MB.
A 32 MB PM7000 recording with ten adaptive channels could require 176 MB.
A 32 MB PM7000 recording with 16 MB for ten adaptive channels and 16 MB mixed waveform/general recording could require 120 MB.

Communication Ports.

A system must have at least one available RS232 port to download a Logger. It is recommended that this serial port be of the 16550 type (but only some very early Pentium systems will have anything else).

A USB to Serial convertor can be used with those systems that have no available serial port. Please refer to APPNOTE: Using a USB to serial converter with a Ranger Logger for more information.

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