LEGO Mindstorms NXT buggy behavior

[KarenS]

Hello - I originally posted this message in another one of the LabView forums, and Roberto very nicely directed to this community board, so here I am.

My grandson recently requested and received a Mindstorms NXT kit for his 11th birthday. He put together a TriBot immediately upon receiving it and patiently waited until I was able to get out there for a visit to help him get the computer component set up. Everything went smoothly and he's been happily immersed in the programming functions, with great success, except for one VERY annoying bug. It seems about 90 percent of the time, after creating a program and downloading it the first time, on subsequent downloads, he will invariably get a "Device busy" error, with a suggesting that we try again or close the app and restart it. We have tried all manner of variations prior to downloading, including deleting the previous version from the NXT, turning it off and on each time, etc., etc., with no success. About 50 percent of the time, closing out and restarting the app will do the trick, but the other half, it seems to be hung with an "initializing V.I." (guessing that message from memory) in the upper right corner of the desktop and the program won't start. We are then forced to go into the Task Manager and kill the process (which still seems to be there even if the program is closed out) before we can restart the program. That will always correct the problem, but you can imagine that it's not a very pleasant "fix," especially since we've had to teach my grandson how to go into and fiddle with the task manager, and that conflicts with the parental controls and user settings on the family computer (the kids each have their own (very limited access) logins.

The computer is just a few months old (HP, 1MB RAM, 320GB hard drive, Windows Vista, 32-bit). I am back home so I'm going from memory, but I can get more specifics from my daughter if need be. Meanwhile, as I said, I don't necessarily expect a troubleshooting response in this forum, as it doesn't seem intended for that, but my Googling unearthed some NXT-related messages posted in here, so I'm hoping that, if it's not the right place, some of the NXT users could point me in the right direction to get support.

Thanks so much, and sorry for the lengthy message!

Karen S

St. Louis, MO

[John Field]

Hi Karen,

Sorry to hear that you are having such issues. MINDSTORMS 1.0 was released before Vista and so, it does not work well with some of Vista's new security measures especially when the software is run from a non-administrator account.

Unfortunately, in the short term, the best advice I can give you is to run MINDSTORMS from an administrator account. If your grandson's family has a Windows XP machine, the software will work well on that operating system also.

In August of this year LEGO will be offering a new version of the software with some new features and Vista support. This new version has been extensively tested with non-administrator accounts. You can learn more here:  http://mindstorms.lego.com/news/#34224.

Hope this helps.

- John

[KarenS]

Good morning, John -

Wow, you guys are just so fast in this place - the "ink" has barely dried on my post LOL and here you are! Thanks for all the useful info on the Windows Vista issues. That's a great idea to try the administrator account to see if the buggy behavior goes away. And of course, I'll be watching closely for the new release to come out, which I'm sure will make for a smoother ride. With all of the problems I've had with other apps (related to my business) running (or not) on Vista, I'm happy and impressed that this is the only problem we've had with the Mindstorms software! It's certainly annoying, but it's one we can live with since he's at least still able to create his programs. Knowing that the Vista compatibility issue is causing problems all across the horizon, we definitely braced our expectations accordingly (the older family computer is Windows 2000, so it's not an option). We were definitely pleasantly surprised and excited when it worked so wonderfully - except for the one minor bug!

Thanks again for the speedy response and the link. Have a great day!

Karen 🙂

Hi Karen,

Sorry to hear that you are having such issues. MINDSTORMS 1.0 was released before Vista and so, it does not work well with some of Vista's new security measures especially when the software is run from a non-administrator account.

Unfortunately, in the short term, the best advice I can give you is to run MINDSTORMS from an administrator account. If your grandson's family has a Windows XP machine, the software will work well on that operating system also.

In August of this year LEGO will be offering a new version of the software with some new features and Vista support. This new version has been extensively tested with non-administrator accounts. You can learn more here:  http://mindstorms.lego.com/news/#34224.

Hope this helps.

- John