POS ZoomBrowser Crashes

Hi, I can't get my new POS Canon A430 Camera to download the pictures to my laptop.

The Laptop is a IBM ThinkPad 380XD, 96MB Ram, 5Gig Hard Drive, P233 CPU running Windows XP Pro.

I tried installing the original disk that came with the camera and also the updated software from the net.

Neither works, the software crashes every time, and send a report to microsoft.

The software will work fine on my Duron desktop.

Canon have no email address listed for help.

My friends Sony camera worked great on my laptop when we tried his after wards.

Maybe I should have bought a Sony?

Any help appreciated.

~Ken
.-.-.

96MB RAM? with XP
I am surprised zoom browser even installed? XP reccomends 128 min,

I hate to say it, but I have to agree - between 96 MB RAM, 5 GB HDD and a Pentium 233, you're lucky you could get XP installed, never mind any other apps. How much disk space do you have free on that? I'd suggest either rolling the computer back to the OS it shipped with, or at least to Windows 2000, less resource-intensive OSes.

Well, I've had people say before. My computer is old, and I should be running Win95 etc etc etc.

But to date this is the only application not to work.

Be it a bit slow, the thing has always run everything thats been installed on it.

Ram wise, 96MB is the max the thing will hold. So it's fully optioned.

I mainly use it as my only portable option, not being able to afford anything newer (Laptops are like $1000 or more new) it has always done the job well for what it is.

As for the OS. I have had 95, 98SE, W2K, XP Home & XP Pro on it.

Compatability and speed wise. XP has definatly run the best so far out of all the operating systems.

I currently run the following without any trouble.

- Firefox
- Outlook Express
- AntiVir Virus guard
- Trillian
- UI-View 32

Plus a hoard of other applications.

If Canons ZoomBrowser is so bulky and bloated that it needs something bigger, surly there is some other software I can install that will download my images via USB?

It's just handy to be able to 1. have the laptop as a portable storage device when away from home when the memory card fills up. And 2. be able to just plug the A430 in and push the little blue lit button to auto download.

As for hard drive space. Yea there's heaps free, so thats not the issue.

BTW, all the Sony camera's that friends have used on it out in the field to date have worked fine!. Boy are they laughing now! They all told me not to buy Canon as it was junk.

Anyhow, still looking for a solution.

.-.-.

No offence but you can't really call it a piece of crap if your computer doesn't meet the min requirements. Yeah you can get away with installing some apps on a machine that doesn't meet the requirements, but you can't expect them all to work. Some company's minimum requiremets are just a suggestion for useability but will work with less. Other company's minimum requirements are just that... install it on a machine with less resources and the application will not work what so ever.

Thats OK. Don't take my opinion.

Google ZoomBrowser for yourself, and see many many many others across the globe also refering to it as a POS!

Anyhow, still not a solution for my problem.

I awate further posts.
.-.-.

Nothing that you're currently running is trying to do anything even remotely approaching what ZB does. Everything you've listed is I/O bound, mostly by your network connection. ZB offers a good deal of functionality which, unfortunately for your computer, requires memory. A 4 MP image needs about 11-12 MB RAM; Photo-stitch, part of ZB, needs to be able to handle 2 or more photos. Camera Remote requires communication protocols between camera and computer. All these take memory, and take processing power. If you're lucky the choke point will be your USB 1.1 capabilities. You've got a better camera, dollar for dollar, than the Sonys your friends have. It's just that with its capabilities, it's placing demands on the system that the computer's not equipped to handle. How are the Sonys connecting to your laptop? Did you have some previous photo software installed? That can interfere with ZB. How does your packet radio system interface with the computer? Have you tried using Windows XP's photo and scanner wizard to download? Is your Windows XP fully patched to the latest version levels? Aside from the risks of running an unpatched computer, changes in Microsoft's DLLs will affect whether third-party software can comunicate successfully.

Hey, I think it's a piece of crap too, I never use it. But it doesn't crash on my machine. It just has a crappy interface and is slow. However, I find it amusing when people complain that it crashes on a machine that doesn't even meet minimum requirements. What do you expect it to do? It's like putting 80 octane in a race car and expecting it to preform like it was running on race fuel. Depending on the car it may not even run.

Go out and buy a USB Card reader. They should be too expensive. Take the card out of the camera and put it in the card reader. I've found that this is a lot faster than downloading off the camera directly. Doesn't matter what you have for a computer it will be faster than throught the camera. Plus it has the benefit of not killing your camera's batteries.

OK, Firstly, all I want to do is download the pictures into the computer.

I don't care about any software to manipulate the images.

I just want to be able to plug the camera in out in the field and push the blue button and the thing will upload the latest pictures that aren't already on the computer. Basically, storage and viewing. But the viewing can be done in something as simple as firefox.

XP will actually recognise the camera and I can drag and drop the images.

The only difference I am looking for is the ability to simply automate the process via the blue button on the camera. That and only upload new images.

OK, now to answer some of the other questions.

- No previous photo software installed.
- Previous camera's tried were connected via USB also (all worked!). Clean XP install since then.
- Why would the packet radio software interfear with the computer? Strange question? It's totally unrelated.
- XP Photo & Scanner Wizard? No don't know of it. I will have a look now.
- XP patches it's self every time the net is available it checks for updates. (Fully automated)

.-.-.

vk4akp wrote in post #2438150
- Why would the packet radio software interfear with the computer? Strange question? It's totally unrelated.

I've seen lot of unrealated pieces of software interfere with each other in the past. Especially if they both do a lot of I/O, or are expecting to share some resources.

Have you tried installing Canon's software before the packet radio software just to see if this is the case? It's not a guarantee, but when things don't work you have to start eliminating all the possibilities.

Were the previous cameras also using their software or what software? If they were just giving the same "drag and drop" you say you're able to do with XP, then they don't possess any inherent "superiority". If you loaded their software, residual files and registry settings can really mess things up. Likewise with your APRS software and radio interface. Windows is prone to a situation called "DLL Hell", where different applications may load different versions of the same DLL, and the wrong version will break applications. In Windows, nothing is unrelated!

I have a P3 1200mhz thinkpad, bought it from a friend, and it had XP pro on it. It only had 128mb ram and ran dead slow so i upgraded to 512mb (2x256) and it runs a ton better

AS per previous posts. 96MB ram is the most the laptop will take.
In every case we used the supplied software with each camera. No issues until using Canon products.
We use a number of these Thinkpads here. THey were purchassed cheap from Oatley for $100 each some time ago. One of which is a totally fresh install of XP. Made no difference.
Once I found it, XP photo scanner / Wizard did work fine. It renames the image files which I don't like as it will cause double ups across my network. It also doesn't maintain the directory store by date format that the canon software does. Nor does it offer easy updates durin downloads IE it doesn't check for files already existing.
So far it's the best option though.
Surely Canon has a simple uploader that doesn't intergrate with all the high end high resource chewing apps?
.-.-.

You might want to try "Downloader Pro" from Breeze Systems. It's about $30. Or write a one-line batch file to copy the files over from the camera (or a card reader, saves camera batteries, and even with USB 1.1 it'll be faster).