Over the past few months, operators have been complaining about the Human Device Interfaces (HDIs) on their operator consoles. The problems include screen freeze-ups, slow data refresh, and ghost images on the screen. A few of the consoles completely crash once or twice a week and must be rebooted.
Because these consoles are from various manufacturers, the operations superintendent says the cause must be dirty power. That fact also implies you can’t just contact one manufacturer for a solution. And even if you did, that fact also implies that such an approach is unlikely to provide the solution.
An electrician used a portable power analyzer at a few consoles and found no unusual power conditions and no serious anomalies. What should you look at?
The portable power analyzer was a break-through instrument when it was first released, and it is still a “must have” for maintenance. But taking snapshot samples instead of collecting power data over time can miss transient events. So, leave an analyzer connected to a console’s supply until a problem happens.
Contacting each manufacturer is part of the answer. For each system, ensure you have the latest hardware drivers. Drivers routinely fall behind OS updates. Also, check the video hardware; each of those symptoms points to video memory over-run. If the video is running from the motherboard or the video card is only 1GB, upgrade to a 4GB card.