Good Day to my fellow T&M equipment enthusiasts,
so, I finally found some time for my write-up. I trust that some of the TLA-owners here might consider this useful.
I have also found a few postings here and in other forums where a remotely-connected PC fails to detect the Logic Analyzer modules installed in a TLA704/714/715/721. I have encountered similar issues, and have found a solution, which I have posted here:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/how-to-remotely-control-a-tektronix-tla715-logic-analyzer-under-ms-win-7/Merry Christmas and a Happy and Healthy New Year to you all.
Cheers,
THD+N_bad
* Checked main board for any leaking capacitors, particularly the 5V supply rail. All capacitors are made by AVX and seemed in good condition.
Removed a 22 µF capacitor and it tested good using my PEAK ESR60 tester (the ESR60 is not perfect, but gives a good indication of the cap's general condition). So, I have reconsidered and have skipped my original plan which was replace all SMD Ta-caps.
* Checked SDRAM module is properly seated. Installed a 2nd 256 MByte SDRAM PC-133 module, bought from
https://www.speicher.de/ via ebay for 27€.
* Cleaned main fans on rear, front bezel, keyboard, trackball, housing and CPU heat sink. Used a mix of IPA / phenylalcohol and water as per the service manual to clean the LCD, all outer panels.
I have used about 200 ml of IPA total, a shoe brush and an old baking tray and some microfibre cloths for cleaning.
* Checked NVRAM on PC motherboard and archived content / BIOS using a Win 98 boot floppy disk and uniflash from
http://www.rainbow-software.org/uniflash/ * uniflash UNIFLASH -SAVE BACKUP.BIN -QUIT
* Installed new solid state disk/SSD to 44-pin IDE interface behind front bezel and replaced the system-HDD with the SSD
* Unsed nLite to create a new bootable CD from Windows XP OEM install CD. I am usually very sceptical about any 3rd party installers/tools, but
http://www.nliteos.com/ is really worth a look.
best advice on nLite:
https://lifehacker.com/386526/slipstream-service-pack-3-into-your-windows-xp-installation-cd* Installed Windows XP pro
* Installed TLA release version 5.1 on TLA 715, see tektronix_Softwareinstallation_TLASWDOWN_V51SP1.pdf
(see
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/remote-tla-clientserver-sw/msg440817/?topicseen#msg440817 on TCP/IP EtherNet networking upgrade from TLA v3.2 up to v5.1
* Installed TLA to PCI bridge using the OEM driver from Tektronix
* Installed TLA 5.1 SP1 patch file:
https://www.tek.com/node/803857-software/tla-application-registry-patch* Installed a 10/100 MBit Network card, Sophos antivirus and a webbrowser. The latter was a very frustrating experience, read below..
Midori webbrowser
http://midori-browser.org/, Midori had a few errors at start-up, see
https://bugs.launchpad.net/midori/+bug/1464836 and I have ended up copying all DLLs from the /midori/bin filder to /windows/system, which removed some errors.
It still crashed and was utterly slow, so I have removed it.
Qupzilla did not even install correctly, was showing some errors at start, so dumped, too.
Ice dragon was missing a DLL "api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll", so no luck either
Vivaldi did not even install.
Same for Seamonkey, which gave a message that it requires Win XP SP2 and failed to detect that it is running on a WIN XP SP3 system.
Maxthon did not show any reaction when trying to install it.
Light - from
https://sourceforge.net/projects/lightfirefox/postdownload?source=dlp was a complete fail, also, as it did not install properly.
Palemoon installed, showed no reaction whatsover when started.
SR ware Iron- did not support the OS in my TLA715
Finally found the TOR browser, which installed and runs fine.
https://www.torproject.org * I wanted to replaced the TEAC CD-ROM drive with a used CD-R/W/DVD-ROM driver from company Global Notebook UG via ebay for 15€. Two drives have failed. I suspect the BIOS is not very tolerant. Re-installed the original CD-ROM drive.
* "Upgraded" the TLA7N4 module to max. memory and state freq.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/tla-hacks-)/50/
* Upgrade completed successfully! Option 7S (200MHz State, 4M Depth)*
* Install TLA release on remote control PC system, and connect to TLA 715
To do:
* Fix broken Power Switch of TLA 715