Merged Lexia & Diagbox threads

[Mandrake]

Good grief, a Pentium 3 with 256MB of ram ?

I'm amazed Diagbox runs on it at all ! I find it slower than I'd like on a Core 2 Duo with 2GB of ram and wouldn't recommend it at all with less than 1GB.

You might not think Diagbox was a pile of c**p on a faster machine.... it actually has some really nice features (on new enough cars) like background data logging during diagnostics sessions which Lexia can't do.

At least it works for you though. It doesn't need to be fast or pretty as long as it gets the job done and saves an £80 trip to the stealer each time you need to check something!

[Chlorate]

At least it works for you though. It doesn't need to be fast or pretty as long as it gets the job done and saves an £80 trip to the stealer each time you need to check something!

Precisely what with the interesting electrical problems I've had with my car it'll pay for itself in no time at all.

Funnily enough it ran very slowly on my desktop too, in fact almost as slow - a core 2 duo with 4gig of ram. It just seems like a very poorly optimised bit of software.
I really do wonder why it needs so much processing power...it really shouldn't!

Sorry to hear you're having concerns with it

The troubles are software based Andy, I'm still more than happy with a free working laptop that (now) works as a diagnosis machine.

[spider]

Ah no problem, I'd hate to think you had problems with it that's all. As I say tt did work. , albeit slowly.

If its any consolation my replacement (An Argos MSI U180 nettop) is very slow too even after voiding the warranty to stick 2Gb (its max) into it an an SSD. I stuck XP on it too (instead of 7 took ages to find drivers as they did not really exist, a mix-n-match eventually)

I did hear that older versions of Diagbox (v5?) would run better ie quicker but you'd lose some functionality I'm looking into that although I'm not sure.

[spider]

One thing I have noticed, one (or two) optional XP updates can stop it working, the sim application cannot start anymore. It does not appear on the taskbar. I've not tried to use it when its doing this so I'm not sure how much it will be effected, I expect it will not work at all though, I'll try to check this when I get a moment.

I'm unable to determine which ones are the cause as the list of installed updates only lists by date not time.

It was an optional update though so it won't install unless you choose it (but its listed in the regular 'express' ones)

Uninstalling / Reinstalling Diagbox (601 in this case) does not fix. A fresh installation of XP seems to be the quickest fix personally.

[spider]

Sorry for another ( ! ) post.

A fix can be had by another method for a missing 'sim' although its a pain it may be quicker:

Uninstall any fixes called "Update for XP" , do not uninstall any that say "Security" in the title and do not uninstall any that list other fixes (unless it is one item) , there will only be about 3 to remove this way. As I say only the "update for xp" and none that list multiple items. Do not uninstall "Security Update" only "Update for" and only ones that only have one item that is in conflict. This is easier to do that explain.

Reboot. If any updates are demanded, install them. Reboot again.

Uninstall all the other "Update for XP" listed, again do not remove any that say "Security update" , ignore warnings and remove them. Do not reboot until you've removed them all (probably ten items)

Re-run XP update and let it install them all (two or three reboots) , sim will re-appear after one or two reboots for updates. After this there should be NO priority fixes left to install at all.

Fixed. All XP updates are present and sim is still alive.

Disclaimer: I think (as I've had this happen twice before) something in one update upsets the sim app enough for it to not work anymore, I'd not recommend my "fix" unless you are contemplating re-installing Windows to rectify. It can be fixed in about 30 minutes compared to a good hour or two for a fresh XP and fresh Diagbox.

At your own risk etc.

[Mandrake]

Can't say I've ever heard of anyone experiencing this problem Andy.

I install Windows updates on my Lexia installation (Windows XP SP3) with careless abandon and have yet to have a problem with SIM not launching or Diagbox not working...

[spider]

Yes not sure why its doing it. Although I have found if you wait and it still does not start you can manually run simstart.bat anyways. (and yes the existing entry is still in the registry) can only assume its being called too early or something.

[spider]

Did some experimentation over the past few days. V5 will install / run on 2K without issue. 7 will install (with a small tweak) but not run. Not yet tested 6.

To make 7 (and possibly 6) install* on 2K:

Grab winrar or similar and open the .iso, inside that open archives\PP2000.z and inside that grab msvcp60.dll from \AWRoot\dtwr\updt\MAJDIST\AWRoot\bin\mmi\ there is another one in \Lexia but its an older dll version.

For what its worth it will install without complaining on the server version of 2K (adv server only it seems normal server falls over) without the dll fuss.

Copy this file to \winnt\system32 if its already present (unlikely) do not overwrite. Then do the installation as normal, not forgetting when finished (all of them) to do the MAJ_COM=FALSE (in \awroot\bin\launcher\ap.ini) to avoid any risk of the interface being zapped.

*install not run, I'm looking into that. Can also confirm 7 seems to be OK on Win7 too although again not really tried to any extent beyond install / upgrade.

As you can tell, I've been busy

Regarding running its on a virtual machine so I've not been able to hook it to a car but nothing appeared amiss.

[spider]

V5 and V6 both appear OK on 2K with the aforementioned tweaks, pain to do though as they don't error till near the end. Its not really worth running them on 2K apart from lower hardware (sub 1ghz CPU I think) though:

[Ben82]

Whilst trying to work out how diagbox launches lexia (in the hope I could create a shortcut to skip the whole diagbox part for my car) I found out why Lexia doesn't work on 64bit-anything..

Lexia is a 16bit application, 64bit CPUs don't have the virtual 8086 mode available in native 64-bit mode.. only when running a 32bit OS. So is only available to 64bit OSes in a virtualized environment. (because I'm doubting PSA will update lexia to at least a 32bit program )

Spider, I use my interface in a XP VirtualBox VM without issue, so I doubt you'll have issues. One thing you might want to do is add a USB Device filter for the VM, so the VM always takes over the USB device. (my filter for Vendor ID: 103a works fine for me )

[spider]

With a lowly U180 netbook (Atom 1.6), 2gb ram and a cheap SSD running a VM may be step too far. Its not exactly quick even with much trimming of XP including some reg tweaks. Having said that the speed concern is Diagbox I think.

[Mandrake]

With my laptop dying on me the other day I've borrowed a Samsung NC110 netbook from work again and installed Diagbox 7.02 on it. It's a 1.6Ghz atom, (N550) with 2GB ram and 230GB hard drive, running Windows 7 professional 32 bit.

Diagbox is a wee bit slow to load, but other than that its very usable indeed, and happily runs it natively under Windows 7 without a virtual machine. The only tweak I had to make was editing ecran.ini to reduce the vertical resolution of the Lexia app to 600 so that it fits on the screen.

Compared to my dead laptop the battery life is outstanding (6-7 hours constant running of Diagbox compared to 2 if I was lucky on the Dell) and the screen is super bright when the brightness is turned right up being easily readable in broad daylight where the other one I could barely read it in daylight. It's also very small and light. If you can accept a slower load time, I think a decent netbook makes a lot of sense as a Lexia/Diagbox machine rather than a full size laptop.

One other thing I tried today - previously I've always been religious about editing ap.ini to change MAJ_COM=TRUE to MAJ_COM=FALSE after installing or updating, this prevents the software from attempting to update the firmware on the interface, which it will normally try to do automatically when you launch Diagbox.

This is specifically advised in the documentation that easydiagnostics provided me, and scuttlebutt on the internet is that the firmware update can permanently brick clone interfaces, therefore must be disabled.

Today I thought what the heck, nobody else seems to be going to the trouble of editing this file, I'll just let it update the interface and see what happens. I checked the firmware version before and after with interface checker, my interface was previously on 4.2.4, launching Diagbox 7.02 has updated it to firmware 4.3.0, and it's still working fine!

So from this I conclude that the interfaces from easydiagnostics are genuine ones that are safe to update the firmware of...so I'm not going to bother with editing that line anymore, I'll just let it update the firmware if needed. Presumably there are bug fixes in those firmware updates so its probably worth having them if safe.

[Ben82]

I've never done the maj_comm thing on mine and mine certainly came from china! I think it's the old interfaces that it causes trouble with (the ones that can't go beyond 5.29)

Guessing you mean 32bit Win7? it's only 64bit anything that'd cause issues due to Lexia being 16bit.

[Hell Razor5543]

Another thing that can increase the battery life is to turn off the wireless network. That could add another couple of hours usage.

[Chlorate]

Daft question:
Is it safe to drive with a Lexia plugged in and running?

Aside from the obvious hazards of course.

Alex