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Dear Sylvie,
> Since we run on Vista and also had strange ghost data
> filling up our hard drive, we got Zeiss to reinstall Vista and Zen.
This is a (known) bug of Zen 2010, made worse when it crashes. It
doesn't always clean up after itself. Zen 2011 seems less affected (and
more stable in general - a new PC with Zen 2011 is helping us here). You
normally find a large number of lsm0.tmp files in the user directory,
buried deep in application settings. The location of this temporary
pixel data stream directory can be changed in Zen under the Maintain tab
> Image display > Temporary files directory. The manual even suggests
(and I agree) that if you are making large datasets, "use a drive other
than the C-Drive of your computer". We did that for a user who was doing
~ 0.5 TB acquisitions. It's also helpful to have the temp directory
somewhere visible to make it easier to see when cruft is building up.
> It only solved the hard disk problem but not the communication
> problems. They have become a lot worse lately. One of the reason in
> our case might be the the plugs that Zeiss uses are very loose and
> the cables wiggle in them but I suspect this is not the only reason.
The ethernet cables must be fully home, with a 'click' as our engineer
advised. The standard cables have a very stiff cap over the jack,
meaning you have to push quite hard to get it in all the way. Also, it
may be worth testing the network card in the PC.
Finally, if possible, use the "Finish current step" button and not the
much bigger "Stop" button to terminate an acquisition. That allows Zen
to retrieve all the pixel data which it expects, and stop gracefully.
Michael
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