Here is about the only comment I have received so far:
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I haven't heard any "public" comments from other NT-based Bruker
owners.
Here's my 2-cents.
Our NT-based DRX-Avance was installed in July, and has been
serving us very
well. There are still glitches being worked out, but that should
be
expected (in my opinion). I have no other experience with any
other Bruker
hardware, so I don't have any way to judge which of my problems
are related
to NT, and which are just general Bruker problems.
Compared to any other commercial NMR instrument I have used, this
is
certainly the best by far. Problems with the system have been,
for the most
part, minor annoyances for which I found my own workarounds. I
still have 4
or 5 open dispatches for such minor things; however, nothing is
preventing
us from doing any experiments we might dream up.
Here are a few considerations that I feel are relevant to NT-based
systems
(specifically).
* You CANNOT telnet to 'spect'. Therefore, there is no way to
connect to
the ccu from the workstation to run diagnostics. Bruker has many
canned
"scripts" which execute some of the diagnostic programs in the
CCU in the
background; however, not all of them. Right now, I need to run
"rcutest" to
check a possible problem with my RCU....can't do it...no way, no
how.
Bruker is rather amusing on this issue. I've had "knowledgeable"
service/support tell me everything from "it's fixed" to "it used
to work" to
"it never has worked"...in regard to using telnet to connect to
'spect'...
* Many of the "infant failure" problems with the NT systems have
been
ostensibly fixed in version 2.6 of the XwinSuite software. This
may indeed
be true, as at the Avance II class and the Service and Maintenance
class
that I attended "it's fixed in 2.6" was a popular phrase.
Personally,
having just installed 2.6 and all relevant patches thereto, no
problems that
I have experienced with the systems have indeed been fixed in 2.6.
* License File Administration is STUPID w/ NT;
Consider this: the spectrometer computer is the Flexm
license server...(I had no choice in this, as far as
I
know)...for the single offline workstation. The users do nearly
all of the
data processing at the workstation to maximize the throughput of
the
instrument. If someone improperly exits Windows-NT without
properly
shutting down XwinNMR first (thereby, checking-in the active
license key),
nobody can run Xwin again because the license server will complain
that too
many copies are running. The only way to fix this, as far as I
can tell, is
to reboot the INSTRUMENT COMPUTER!!!
Solution: we do most of our 1D NMR dataprocessing in
Nuts, and I
do most of my 2D in Nuts also...end of problem.
Bottom line...I am very happy with the system. It is stable,
reliable, and
bugs are only minor annoyances for the most part, and have not yet
prevented
us from doing any science...everything works. NT vs. UNIX is a
preference
choice that individuals have the luxury of making (for the moment,
at
least). I have many, many Sun UNIX boxes, running OS versions
from SunOS
version 4.0.3 to Solaris 2.6. The last thing I needed was another
flavor of
UNIX in the mix (IRIX) with the added security and SysAdmin
headaches. I
can administer a gaggle of NT-boxes with much less headache than
the same
gaggle of UNIX boxes. And, I have been a seasoned UNIX SysAdmin
for much
longer than I have been so for NT...self-taught in both, and I
have to do
all SysAdmin duties in my "spare time" (like many of us have to
do). If I
get a grant funded, I would not hesitate to add more NT-based
systems...and
will probably do so if given the choice.
--
My personal web page is :
http://www.uvm.edu/~jbreeyea
Location:
University of Vermont
Chemistry Dept.
Cook Science Building
Burlington, Vermont 05405
Tel: 802 656 0196
Fax: 802 656 8705
Received on Mon Jan 10 2000 - 14:02:35 MST