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If its any help Dirk we had the same issue last year with monthly hardware disconnect issues of our Windows operated mounts at our eight-mount remote site where problems would occur monthly between midnight and 2am.
If you are running Windows 7 or 8.1 then possibly MS update KB2952664 might be responsible.
This is a CEIP data harvesting app that MS uses to assess software and hardware compatibility issues for Windows 7/8.1 users that might migrate to Windows 10 and it probes USB connected devices causing them to stop working and require a re-connect.
We removed KB2952664 from our Win 7/ 8.1 systems and the problem went away.
Unfortunately it is a difficult update to remove and requires special procedures. Rather than repeat it all again here I wrote a complete instruction to help another user on the Diffraction Limited forum and you can read it there:
https://forum.diffractionlimited.com...10/#post-29641
[also attached to this message rbd]
Besides this specific issue, for Windows systems used in critical control applications it is worth reviewing the Windows Scheduled Tasks list and editing the start time for any daily / weekly / monthly tasks to ensure that they are scheduled to run only during daytime. By default MS and some third party apps are set to run scheduled tasks after midnight and while these don't usually cause hardware issues they do slow down the system by taking away processor resources. Hourly tasks are usually no problem and can be left alone.
Finally, just in the last few months Google Chrome slipped in a data harvesting task, SoftwareReporterTool.exe, which caries out an audit of all your hard drive software and sends it to Google. This is scheduled to run monthly after midnight plus each time Chrome is launched after a reboot and we found on our systems that it launches a copy of SoftwareReporterTool.exe for each configured user of the system. On our remote site we had four users and two administrators per system and together with Windows default hidden guest account there would be seven copies of SoftwareReporterTool.exe all running concurrently.
During this time plate solving would take up to 15 minutes or more instead of the usual ~3-5 seconds, ACP would hang, Maxim would freeze and camera control would lock-up as this Google tool was taking all processor resources and causing hard drive bottlenecks.
We removed Chrome Browser from our remote systems and this problem was cured though this was an issue partly of our own making since there was no need to have Chrome installed on the remote systems in the first place, our on-site tech installed Chrome without checking in with us first.
William
*** IMPORTANT ***
Due to limitations in the way that a .pdf document is created from a web document (text wrapping) please note that with the PowerShell commands referenced in the attached .pdf that Bob created from the original post at Diffraction Limited, PowerShell commands, strings, arguments etc are always entered on a single line without a line feed (CR).
If you see any referenced PowerShell commands/strings/arguments spread over two lines in the attached .pdf then this is a pdf formatting error, all command strings are entered as a single line only.
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*** IMPORTANT ***
Due to limitations in the way that a .pdf document is created from a web document (text wrapping) please note that with the PowerShell commands referenced in the attached .pdf that Bob created from the original post at Diffraction Limited, PowerShell commands, strings, arguments etc are always entered on a single line without a line feed (CR).
If you see any referenced PowerShell commands/strings/arguments spread over two lines in the attached .pdf then this is a .pdf formatting error, all command strings are entered as a single line only.
William
