Control.com - Nerds in Control

Thanks in advance to all.

We're running Advantech's PCI-6886F-MOA1 motherboard with SST-DN3-PCI-1 Devicenet cards and some controllers have the Blackbox IC971C PCI card (RS232/422/485). The OS is Win2k SP4 with all critical updates. We're using the latest video/chipset drivers from Intel's website. The problem we've been having is that sometimes OPCLink and Network Express stop communicating. At times, VLC will keep operating fine and we can just restart OPCLink and Network Express, other times we have to do a load and go. Other times we have had Win2k completely lockup (we verified by looking at the system clock - no keyboards are attached to the PCs) - and the inability to ping the controller; so we have to do a hard reboot. ACPI is enabled in the BIOS and thus Windows installed as such. We've tried doing a new build with different drivers with the same loss of communications effect. We're currently doing a new build with ACPI disabled. But the problem is we don't know what's causing it so for us to prove this is the problem is impossible. Does anyone have any ideas on what we could do to cause lockups or maybe areas to test?

Go into BIOS setup, Advanced BIOS Features and disable the APIC setting then reinstall WIN2K.

ACPI could be the issue but the APIC setting is more likely.

Also look at the BIOS version on the board. BIOS version 1.22 is the newest. Can download the new BIOS from our support site. Just search for PCI-6886.