Sequence Editor Not Responding

[jstorms]

So after a month or two I opened up the Sequence Editor on my very beefy Lenovo Win10 laptop. 

The sequence editor loads up fine, but when I go to load a file it just sits there (Not Responding). I tried opening a LMS file with about 40 channels and after an hour gave up on it.

I downloaded the newest version of the LOR software installed it, rebooted my computer, but still get the same results.

Any ideas before I set my computer back to defaults?

[gsmith37064]

Are you accessing any files over the network? Are you connected wired? Wifi? If so what are the file sizes?

I get that when i load in a sequence over wifi that is 100+ megs. Sometimes if will time out if my drobo does not spin up fast enough.

[PhilMassey]

Only thing I can think of is to do a complete uninstall and reinstall of LOR and run Lorpost to set your default folders.

[TonyD]

Install the System Internals (now microsoft) "filemon" utility and see what's locking that file. I know you're techie enough.

Sent from my LG-V495 using Tapatalk

[jstorms]

This was happening on all sequence files, on a local drive. Files were loading, albeit, very, very slowly. A short sequence (with basically no sequencing) took a few minutes. A normal sequence without pixels or RGB, well I gave up after waiting 2 hours.

I rebooted Windows a couple of times, reinstalled the LOR software, upgraded to the latest LOR software and no luck. LOR software was using very little CPU and not much memory.

So I went and reset Windows 10. Reinstalled everything and now it seems to be okay.

Honestly, I think my problem was/is that my computer upgraded to Win10 and it didn't come with it already installed.   

I hate my Lenovo W540, oh so very much, for oh so many reasons. New Dell laptop is on the way.

Edited July 20, 2016 by jstorms

[k6ccc]

One of my basic concepts with Windows - Always do clean installs, never "upgrades".  Too many problems on an upgrade with things just not working quite right.  Besides, a clean installation give the advantage of getting rid of old crap (old software you have not used in years, some oddball dll file that some piece of software installed or modified, and most importantly, leftover registry garbage).

As for hating you Lenovo W540, they went on my banned list after it was discovered that the Chinese factory was adding spyware to the pre-installed Windows.

 

[Mr. P]

34 minutes ago, k6ccc said:

As for hating you Lenovo W540, they went on my banned list after it was discovered that the Chinese factory was adding spyware to the pre-installed Windows.

 

HP is also on my banned list due to their Whitelist, to hard to do simple upgrades.

[LOR Staff]

17 hours ago, k6ccc said:

One of my basic concepts with Windows - Always do clean installs, never "upgrades".  Too many problems on an upgrade with things just not working quite right.  Besides, a clean installation give the advantage of getting rid of old crap (old software you have not used in years, some oddball dll file that some piece of software installed or modified, and most importantly, leftover registry garbage).

As for hating you Lenovo W540, they went on my banned list after it was discovered that the Chinese factory was adding spyware to the pre-installed Windows.

 

Once again I agree with Jim.  It has been my experience that upgrades, or even 'bare metal recoveries' (see below) are about the worst thing you can do with Windows.  Basically your system may have been marginal before, or worse - working when it really should not have been working.  Now you throw the upgrade in there, assumptions are made about the state of your hardware, and kablam.

Even MS's enterprise level software (Server operating systems) fall far short sometimes.  I don't remember if it started with with Server 2008, or if it was possibly earlier, that MS touted 'bare metal recovery to dissimilar hardware'.  Imagine that you have a server running and have a backup.  That server dies and that hardware is no longer sold (frequent).  The idea of the bare metal recovery was that you could restore your system image to a new piece of hardware and Windows would get rid of old device drivers, install the new ones, etc all at the same time.  Basically they said - restore the bare metal backup to any hardware and it just works.

I've done it about 20 times.  It has NEVER worked correctly.

In fact, I don't even trust a NEW computer with a loaded copy of Widows and all the bloatware they install.  When it comes out of the box, I reformat it immediately and put a fresh clean non-bloated install on it.

I also have to agree with Jim's assessment of Lenovo.  The Thinkpad used to be THE defacto standard when it came to high-end corporate laptops - and all I would buy.  Several years ago my T40 had to have the graphics processor reballed not once but TWICE.  They failed to add enough cooling to it, the board/chip would get hot, and eventually the solder connections from the GPU to the board would break.  I have not purchased a Lenovo product since.  When they were an IBM product they were superior.  After IBM sold the line to the Chinese they became crap.

[k6ccc]

21 minutes ago, DevMike said:

Once again I agree with Jim.

You trying to give me swelled head Mike? 

 

24 minutes ago, DevMike said:

Even MS's enterprise level software (Server operating systems) fall far short sometimes.  I don't remember if it started with with Server 2008, or if it was possibly earlier, that MS touted 'bare metal recovery to dissimilar hardware'.  Imagine that you have a server running and have a backup.  That server dies and that hardware is no longer sold (frequent).  The idea of the bare metal recovery was that you could restore your system image to a new piece of hardware and Windows would get rid of old device drivers, install the new ones, etc all at the same time.  Basically they said - restore the bare metal backup to any hardware and it just works.

I've done it about 20 times.  It has NEVER worked correctly.

 

I'm very glad to hear you say that.  I recently replaced my ancient Dell server that died with a much newer Dell server.  Both old and new were running Server 2012 R2, and in fact it was the same drives for the C: drive since I moved the almost brand new SSD based RAID array from the old computer that I had recently gone to.  Even with that I elected to format drives and do a clean Windows installation rather than the "Bare Metal Recovery".  Even though it meant a few days of getting software installed and configured, I'm glad to hear that it was worth it!

 

[wt1924]

Hello,

I upgraded to Windows 10, I opened SE and it did load sequences fine but a little slow. When I started sequencing everything was very slow. Seconds to minutes for basic functions. I could not use the back button at all. To make a long story short, I went back to Windows 7 and now it is running like a champ again. I just wanted to chime in with a real circumstance of Windows 10 upgrade not going well. Others functions were a little slower on my computer, but LOR SE was really slow with hundreds of channels until I went back to Windows 7.

William

[Ebuechner]

I would like to know if this is a definitive answer. Is Windows 10 the problem?  I have a large Channel count (12500) and I'm just wondering if my problem is that sequence editor just isn't capable of handling that many channels. Or is it having a problem running in a Windows 10 environment. I have a newer machine that wasn't a pre-built with a lot of bloatware. I'm running a AMD 7860k processor on an Asus motherboard with 32 gigs of memory. From what I've seen the light O Rama software isn't using the memory very well.  I'm not in front of my computer to check this but is light O Rama software still running at 32 bits?

[Mr. P]

My experience here: I attempted to upgrade to Win 10 three different times but ran into problems each time either with the install or things not working correctly after the install. I just decided to stay with Win 7 until support runs out in 2020, Everything works perfectly and I will more then likely have new computers by that time anyway.

Edited July 27, 2016 by Mr. P

[Ebuechner]

My computer is running Windows 10 and I'm having problems. Sometimes so bad that I click on something and go make lunch and hope it's done by the time I'm back. I've become a master at building my sequence in parts then assembling it into a completed sequence. Some of my completed sequences won't play in sequence editor

[Dave76]

Anyone have any updates on running Windows 10?  Looking at new laptops and that's all that is available.  I actually have a W7 desktop I've been using and I'm going to try my sequences on another desktop running W10.  

I've read people haven't had good results sequencing on machine X and then moving and playing on machine Y.  Another thing I want to test.

[Ebuechner]

I was able to get an answer but not here. Light O Rama sequence editor was written not thinking of the large Channel count that people are using these days. As your channel count goes up their file gets large and bulky and most machines have trouble handling it then you throw Windows 10 at it which uses up more Computer Resources and you have a problem. As a fix light O Rama introduced intensity files and pixel editor to keep up with the changes in the hobby. But the problem still is that sequence editor still operates with a large XML file that's not compressed. I ended up abandoning my light O Rama software that I paid for to move on to the Big Boy software. I'm still hoping that they will have a big change coming that will keep up. 

[LOR Staff]

As I said previously in this topic, Windows 10 and S4 work great together.  All development has moved to Win10 machines and we experience no issues.  There have a couple of people that have experienced issues with Win 10 and S4, but the only thing in common has been they 'Upgraded' rather than did a 'Fresh Install' of Win 10.  

Windows (from a code standpoint) is HUGE.  I do not doubt that MS missed some things when doing an upgrade.  Perhaps they left some old library around.  Perhaps one of the drivers for your hardware is not playing by the rules - They could get away with it in 7, but now in 10 it causes problems.  Even their enterprise level software (where they make the BIG bucks) sometimes falls short when doing upgrades and or restores.  We can spend all day speculating.

Many people think it is a cop-out when software companies (or developers like me) tell you that the problem is in Windows and you need a reformat/reinstall.  Many times they are right in thinking that because a company just wants you out of their hair.  Sometimes, it's just what the doctor (developer) ordered.

As for performance/resource allocation of Win10 Vs Win7/Win8/Win8.1, please take a look at this article: http://www.techspot.com/review/1042-windows-10-vs-windows-8-vs-windows-7/

Specifically, this page: http://www.techspot.com/review/1042-windows-10-vs-windows-8-vs-windows-7/page7.html
 

" The short version of this conclusion is that a properly set up Windows machine equipped with semi-modern hardware should be capable of running Windows 7 or above more than adequately. The same hardware that currently runs Windows 7 competently can be upgraded to Windows 10 with no issues whatsoever on the performance front. " (emphasis mine)

[Dcroc]

I have an "upgrade" 10 machine, and a "new install" machine. No problems on either. In fact, I have used LOR with Win XP, Win 7, 8, and now 10, and it works better than ever on 10.  Might be worth mentioning that I use top shelf INTEL processors in all cases. (no Celeron, no AMD, etc.). There are so many variables when it comes to computers.  I learned in the past that cheaper chipsets don't always play nice with 3rd party hardware, and sometimes even some software doesn't seem to run as smooth. Although I have run LOR on some pretty low resource puters with little issue (XP with 1.5 gigs of ram), I find it kinda counter-productive, IMHO, to spend all this money on LOR equipment, props, and lights, and then try to pinch pennies on the very brain of the display. If you don't want to use a PC, there are alternatives such as Showtime, Pi, and such. However, if you are going to use a PC, the last thing you want is Windows/computer problems when your show is suppose to be running.