ND2E's Blog

This afternoon I started on the K3 build. Spent a several hours inventorying the parts before actually starting the build. So far I have almost 3 hours into the construction and things are going together quite well. Fit and finish are quite nice. The instruction manual is first rate. The only quibble I have is that part names are used in the manual but the parts have part numbers and in many instances don’t have part names.

The USB Serial device that has given me a problem is the IOGEAR USB to 2-Port Serial RS-232 Converter, Model GUC2322. I reinstalled it and reinstalled the driver on their web page.  Again I noted the major increase in the System Process CPU usage. I removed it and placed an old USB 1.1 Prolific adapter in and the CPU usage for the System task went to 7% on the peaks and stayed down at zero most of the time.

I will eventually contact IOGEAR and Moschip to find out why.  But for the moment the Dual Port device is not usable in my system.

Last year when I lost my big Dimension 8400 to a series of power faults, I started using my old Dell 900MHz laptop. It was horribly slow and was really limping when running the Ham Radio Deluxe V4 package. To fix the problem I bought an older 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 Dell GX270 figuring that it would be much faster than the Dell laptop. Since is was supposed to be so much faster I upgraded to the latest HRD V5 Beta package expecting blindingly fast operation. I was disappointed and started looking for the reason. I somehow got the machine into a state where it was so slow that it took 20 minutes to boot. I finally fixed that problem so I was back to the original complaint that when running HRD it would slow to a stop  for several seconds. I couldn’t run another background tasks without significantly impacting the QSO.

I have spent several hours off and on looking for the cause of the slowdown. I have finally located one of the reasons slowing my computer when using Ham Radio Deluxe.

According to the info on the HRD website, HRD is a very light load on the computer. I concur that it is a very small load but whenever I ran HRD/DM780/HRDlog my computer bogged down. I spent several hours tracking down what was causing the slowdown. Finally, I noticed that the System process was consuming valuable realtime. I searched the web for System process information and came across several articles that indicated USB-connected peripherals such as USB-Serial adapters can cause the System process to balloon.

I changed the interface point to my only serial port and the load presented by the System process dropped from 50-70% to 0-5%.  That is a really significant change that may allow the HRD package to run without hesitation or slowdown that have plagued me since I brought the Dell GX270 on line.

Hopefully this info will be of use to others.

73 de ND2E