Roboard & Win XP

[ero offline]

Just received my new Roboard rb-110. I successfully installed Windows XP Pro. I have a couple questions and comments related to this:

XP Pro runs, albeit slow. My thought is that 256mb is just not going to cut it. I've read other comments that reflect this as well. My question is Has anyone else installed XP Pro and subsequently tried XP Embedded? If so, does Embedded run any faster? Overall, what are your impressions with this?

Has anyone installed Windows Embedded Compact 7? If so, how has that worked, i.e. stability, performance, etc?

My preference would be XP Embedded, provided that performance is acceptable.

I bought the starter kit, which included the vga card, seems to work ok, except the display is mostly green. Anyone else seeing this or is this something specific with my setup?

Power supply: For setup, I used a wall adapter that was recommended by another poster on this board, works well. Can anyone share what battery based power source they're using? Specific model, brand and where purchased would be very helpful.

Thanks in advance.

[PaulL offline]

It's not the RAM as much as it's the services running in the background. The RAM doesn't become an issue until you try to run "heavy" applications.

I don't think you'll see a whole lot of difference between XPe ans XP if you turn off services that aren't needed.

I haven't loaded XPe, but I've loaded XP - it's OK, and you can get decent boot / shutdown times (30 seconds or so) if you turn off enough services. I found I needed a few and the time goes up the more you turn on.

XP isn't that bad on Roboard. Things start to get slow when you try to do more. Roboard is truly an embedded platform, not intended to do desktop-ish things.

As for green, that's not right, something's wrong somewhere.

I've used a custom 12 volt supply and a desktop PC power supply. If you have enough current, that's what matters. Any battery that can provide enough current but not too much voltage will suffice.

Take Care,
Paul

[ero offline]

Thank you for the reply. After reading through more posts on the subject, I have a little better understanding of what's going on. You're right about the ram, 256 should probably be enough for core services required but another big factor is EWF (Enhanced Write Filter). I remember this from a while back when I was working with XPE on another device (non-robotics related). I didn't think about the option of enabling that on regular XP, so I'm going to try that first.

I installed the XPE image creation tools on a pc last night (takes forever), so I'm going to give XPE a shot and see what type of performance I get from that.

Thanks again for your reply.