[IDV #YEO-725865]: IDV Installation problems on Windows PC

Hi Haley,

This is more-or-less a follow-up and addition to the information
that Julien sent you earlier today...

re:
> Good Day,
> It's Haley Anderson, from PASI Cartagena. I hope all is well.

All is well with me... I got home this morning at 2 am after a reasonably
long travel from Cartagena back to Denver, then Boulder and finally my
house.  

re:
> I tried installing IDV on my pc at home and I got the same problem that
> I got on the laptop during the workshop. You had to edit a script so
> that enough memory was allocated.

OK.  The problem is that the logic that is run to determine the amount
of memory that the IDV should run with by default is overestimating what
your machines can actually accommodate.

re:
> Would it be possible for you to send me some instructions so that I can
> get IDV working on my machine? I would really appreciate it.

Yes, absolutely.

Here is what you should do (NB: the following assumes that your home PC
is also running Windows like the laptop you were using in the Pasi
Workshop):

- edit the IDV startup script and set the amount of memory it should
  use

  The IDV startup script will be found in the C:\Program Files\IDV<ver>
  directory (<ver> would be the version of the IDV that was installed
  IF your installation followed defaults; for example IDV 4.0u2)

- The script for a Windows installation is a Windows BATCH file named
  runIDV.  Edit this file using MS WordPad (not NotePad) and:

  change:

  REM See important note about this above. To bootstrap the IDV memory, 
uncomment 
  REM the line below and set to a value  in megabytes. 
  REM set idv_memory=512

  to:

  REM See important note about this above. To bootstrap the IDV memory, 
uncomment 
  REM the line below and set to a value  in megabytes. 
  set idv_memory=1256

- the objective in doing the editing is to set the idv_memory= value to the
  largest number supported by your machine

  In practice, you will have to try several values before you find the
  largest one that still allows the IDV to run.

Comment:

- the 3-D data model which comprises the underpinnings of the IDV makes
  large demands on a couple of system services:

  - video

  - RAM

  Our experience is that machines that have Nvidia graphics cards with
  sufficient amounts of memory (e.g., minimum of 512 MB and better yet
  1 or 2 GB) work the best.  Interestingly, Apple Mac machines have
  historically used Nvidia graphics subsystems, and so have worked
  well as IDV platforms.

  The other comment we can safely make is that 64-bit systems work
  better than 32-bit ones.  And, the more RAM your machine has the
  better things will run.  The laptop I used during the workshop
  has 8 GB of memory.  After seeing how productive Pasi Workshop participants
  with Macs were, I am musing about buying a Mac Pro with 16 GB
  of RAM.  Given the relatively high cost of Macs, however, I will
  not jump into a move like this until I am convinced that the use
  justifies the cost.

Request:

- it would really help us to know more about the specs on your laptop
  and home PCs:

  - OS (e.g., Windows XP or 7; 32 or 64 bit; CPU type)

  - system RAM

  - video subsystem (e.g., AMD, Nvidia and the amount of memory that
    the subsystem has)

  - disk space  (this is not crucial, but it would nonetheless be
    interesting)

re:
> Much thanks.. again.

I hope that we get the opportunity to interact with each other in the
future!

Cheers,

Tom
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Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: YEO-725865
Department: Support IDV
Priority: Normal
Status: Closed