A conundrum: Nine faulty ActivBoards

[rexboggs5]

A prominent private school in Brisbane, Australia purchased 9 ActivBoards some time ago. They have all exhibited a similar problem - apparently the boards would 'freeze' whilst in use and the system had to be re-booted. They were unable to fix the problem and eventually changed to a different brand, which has worked fine.

The upshot is that I have the opportunity to buy some of these boards at a very good price. Now I can't imagine that all nine boards would have an identical hardware problem, and anyway a board "freezing" to me smacks of a network or software problem. But they do have a competent techie at the school, and a local Promethean re-seller had a go and couldn't resolve the problem. So I find it hard to believe that it is a software/network problem.

Hence the conundrum.

I will have an opportunity to run one of the boards through a test, using my laptop, so I can try to recreate the problem. But I was wondering if anyone had any advice. What might be the factors that would cause all nine Promethean boards to fail in exactly the same way?

Cheers

Rex

[kevhogg]

It's hard to suggest anything - you think well they must have already tried everything, but...

Our experience was with an older board that continued to spike rather than freeze (especially at certain times of the day, despite having worked fine initially. We have a spare board in storage (long story) so one day having nothing much else to do after school, we whipped the board off the wall to see if we could swap over the leads (clutching at straws as you do). Didn't like the look of the serial connection on the back - rather floppy for our liking - so embedded cable and connector in a huge piece of blu-tak and put the board back. It worked and so we haven't changes cables as we had intended - still working.

Could the fault lie in the cables rather than the boards?

[rexboggs5]

I plugged one of the boards into my laptop yesterday and ran ActivStudio and ActivInspire for 20 minutes or so - worked just fine. It turns out the boards had been delivered in two consignments, which makes it a bit less likely that it is a common hardware fault. So we will take a punt and buy the boards.

Cheers

Rex

[slt]

Switching the IWB on/off after a freeze will cure this.
The latest Activ driver will also 'reconnect' after a while so avoiding a PC reboot.