Stability of older Orcad/PSpice combos?

He can read older files into 16.3 but you won't be able to read his at all if you're too many levels back.

Good luck! Stable and OrCAD are mutually exclusive. IOW, you *can't* go back that far.

16.3 can output older files, but not old enough for you to find a "stable" OrCAD (the thought makes me laugh). BTW, I've found that 16.3 *is* more stable than others, at least recent ones. It's still a POS, but less of one.

That said, Cadence isn't happy about supporting older versions. You're on your own. We have a single-user 15.7 OrCAD + Layout + P-Spice seat. When they installed the floating 16.3 license that copy stopped working (so no P-Spice and that copy of Layout stopped working). Cadence didn't care much that we lost P-Spice. It was out of service so not their problem.

Jeorg, You should be able to use an older version (with caveats!) with the new licenses. The older the version, the more likely there was some change in the licensing that would break it, though. Anything I can do to help? I know a thing or two about the software... ;-)

Charlie

I believe Joerg is using Crapture. That is a guarantee of "lossy" crashes :-( ...Jim Thompson

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IT would be nice to know what type of crashes you are getting?

Are these actual built in program messages being generated that causes corruption of your work? It so, you could be taxing some function a bit and the software should know how to recovery it or step backwards that is. If you are getting things like invalid pointers or out of range indexes and things like that? I would venture to say that some one is not doing QC very well...

If you are getting errors that show coming from System API's, kernel faults and such, the ones that really causes the rest of your machine a reboot requirement? I would say that you have have something wrong with your PC? I've found that bad memory and a flaky HD (swap file) can cause random problems on top of a machine running to hot and maybe was over clocked!

It's always that possibility that you are just working it hard and the program is reaching it's bows with the allocated memory requirements and things like that. I've seen where sloppy use of memory handling can cause the memory pool to get fragmented and some where along the line, windows will just not be able to allocate a piece of memory for the code with no safety checks in the code.

Are you using a true Win32 version or some older 16 bit version? It does make a big difference.

Jamie

Thanks, Charlie. I might take you up on that.

Well, yeah, that's part of 16.3 so I am kind of forced to use Capture. That's why I wanted to know, how far back can I safely go without my client losing the ability to read in my stuff?

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Yes, I was working it quite hard. I don't know much about software but most or probably all of the smoke and spatters seem to come from within the app (Orcad) itself. Messages such as "The PSPice COM wrapper error has occurred" cannot possibly come from the Windows OS. Then "This application has quit unexpectedly. To help Cadence ..." is also pretty cliear about the origin. Then there's what I have now, it just refuses to do certain simple things, like opening a project. Instead of opening or at least displaying some error message Orcad just locks up hard.

There is only one version and it's supposed to run on Windows XP. Amnd it does run. For a few days at a time :-(

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Well, if I just knew how far "that far" is :-)

But of course I don't have too high hopes because I did manage to thoroughly crash older version (I believe 9.something) at a client. They weren't too fussed because I wasn't the only one.

[...]

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I call that junk. If you are calling com objects, there is always that chance that an error will happen or some unexpected early return from the COM object. CHecking the status of the object on each return should be done, if it's available. And calling code to outside boundaries should be wrapped in a TRY+EXCEPT block so that the application can gain control and do proper clean up before destroying your work.

More than likely the lock up from project opening is the end results of project files getting corrupted due to the uncontrolled termination of the program. Hope you had back ups..

Trying to start a new project would indicate this to be a fact, if the new project succeeds in creating itself. If not, then you must have some left over config file that got corrupted.

Oh well, it sucks.

Personally, I don't like using third party COM files unless they are well supported to help out the users of it.

Did OrCad take some change of ownership/dev team at some recent point? If so, it could explain a lot about it being buggy. I've always found when a new owner puts a paint job on an old shell, trouble is brewing!

Jamie

[...]

Yes, I do. Of course not from the last few hours so some is lost but not too bad. What is a problem is that this dreaded CAD is out of commission so often. Currently doing an uninstall. Again. Re-install takes a long time because some (to me nonsensical) help index build takes place. Then when you click help it does some more indexing. Beats me why.

I didn't get that far because Orcad completely self-destructed and needed a re-install.

That was a long time ago. Orcad was bought by Cadence. By now my impression is that this might not have been such a good thing to happen. Oh well.

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FWIW, 16.3 is as good as it gets. Hierarchy works, too. I don't particularly like the implementation, but at least it works.

back

Dang. I was hoping not to hear that :-(

Then I must continue the crash -> re-install game.

Just re-installed the whole chebang again. It errors on all the simulation profiles but at least it reads the schematics. Probably only for a few days ...

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if

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I've never had to re-install but the binaries are on a server (floating licenses and all that). Then again, we don't use P-Spice anymore, either.

[...]

That may be the difference. Using PSpice is when all this nasty stuff happens.

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if

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If you have a fairly powerful computer, install vmware ('server' is free, I prefer server 1.xx) and a WinXP guest OS with just enough plus the OrCAD application to do your stuff. Avoid vmware's networking complexities, use the simple share host network option.

Take a snapshot of the guest OS.

Each time it crashes, revert to that snapshot :)

At least the recycling will be much quicker! Some complex software will never be fixed, particularly if the company bought out the competition :/ There are some protection settings that rely on a modern CPU.

You're sure that PC it runs on is okay? Run MEMtest for at least a weekend, you should get zero memory errors.

Grant.

You should be able to at least go back to 15.7, or even 15.5 without too many problems, unless you use a lot of advanced analysis stuff. Capture does pretty well in bringing a version forward, but very poorly in pulling an advanced version back, without forcing a save as for a prior version. I use 15.7, and very rarely get a crash, even when using it with Orcad Layout...

Charlie

Jeorg, Please feel free to give me a call tomorrow (monday) if you need anything. After all, I owe you a bit from the help you have given me over the years! number is on our website edmondsonengineering.com!

Charlie

One thing to watch is that 16.3 will change formats whenever a save is done, even if it's automatic. It'll change the formats of all open libraries, too, unless you're hyper-vigilant. Once they're changed it's hard to go back.

Try selecting an entire page of a busy schematic page, and doing a move. That was the killer in 15.7 (more or less fixed in 16.3).

It sounds like a hardware problem like not enough RAM, or a dying hard drive. If you don't have enough RAM, the drive is constantly reading and writing swap files. That pushes the hardware to it's limits and causes more errors. Also, it may be old enough to have failing electrolytics on the motherboard. I recently picked up three Acer Aspire L100 mini desktops with bad capacitors. All three were running

512 MB of RAM. One also had a bad hard drive. There are just over a year old.

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I have Sun VirtualMachine on here. But Cadence's license model is IMHO highly complicated and cumbersome, I doubt this would work.

Had to work on the weekend because of these dreaded crashes, so no time for the PC to do that. But I doubt there is a problem. There are only two programs that notoriously crash: Orcad and Acrobat, and Acrobat got kicked out which solved that problem. Dozens of other software companies whose SW is on this PC must have done something right because theirs does not crash ;-)

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