Well... I have some New Developments to report!
First off, Rigol USA and their tech Jason have seen the logic of my position and have sent me a "new" scope, with Boot Version 0.0.1.3.
I received the New Scope this morning and have been putting it through its paces. They offered to do this replacement (I didn't ask for it originally) because they have not been able to reproduce the Freeze error on any of their scopes... I guess because they don't have any with the older Boot Version on hand. I convinced them that they should send me the new scope first (just scope itself and its calibration certificate, no accessories) before I sent my old one back. So it's happening, I'll be shipping the Old Scope back to them on Monday. They paid for shipping both ways, of course.
Interestingly, this New Scope was delivered with the Old Firmware, SP1, instead of the latest firmware.
Here's what I've found so far.
1. The Freeze Bug does NOT seem to be present on this scope. I have not been able to get it to freeze by any of the usual methods that work reliably on the Old Scope. So that is Great! I still think that only scopes with Boot Version 0.0.1.2 have the bug.
However the Blue Zoom Window boundaries don't change reliably when the "Freeze bug" conditions are met and the Horizontal Scale knob is rotated.
2. The Math horizontal error is _still present_ at the 500 ns/div, Average acquire mode setting.
Now, at sometime in the past I noted what was a "minor" bug, that is that when the Units are set to Volts on one channel and Amps on another channel and these are multiplied together to give Watts, the scope was smart enough to indicate "Watts" as the units of the Math trace, but only in the Math menu and the text string that gives the Math scale on the screen, and these correct Units did NOT make it through to the Measurements display or the "All Measure" table, which still indicated "U" or "V" for the units instead of Watts. It turns out that the SP2 firmware fixed this minor issue, Great!
And this was true on the Old Scope as well, when it was running SP1. Also, Setup files with Math did not load correctly with the old SP1 firmware, on both Old and New scopes.
But as I said, the New Scope was delivered with the SP1 firmware, and so it had this minor error still, and also still did not load Setup files correctly when they had a Math function incorporated in them. Since I use the power computation frequently, and also use stored setups a lot, I decided to upgrade the New Scope to the SP2 firmware.
So I did. And now the Math units are correctly propagated to the Measurements and the All Measure table, and the Setup files now load correctly, as far as I can tell.
Of course the "Pluses" spelling error is still there, since it comes with the SP2 firmware upgrade.
I can live with that though, since I _know_ that this is simple to fix and they'll at least fix this with the next firmware upgrade.
HOWEVER.... and this is a real pisser..... sometimes the Measurements will simply stop working altogether.
They just stop updating, and the only way that I've found to get them back "live" is to power-cycle the scope. For example, I've just had some traces displayed for some time while doing my forum correspondence, and the measurements were working fine at first. Then I looked over at the scope and found that the measurements had stopped updating, were frozen. This happened without any input or changes from me this time! It has also happened quite a few times while I've been manipulating the controls during testing. I don't know yet the exact conditions to make this happen, but it's really annoying when it does happen, if I'm actually doing something involving the Measurement values. (Lately I've been testing and debugging and doing efficiency computations on some proprietary LED driver and battery charger circuits, so obviously I want the Measurements to work.) SO this New Bug gets a
.
I think that the Old Scope did this too, so it may be a problem in the SP2 software.
Funny... the "StartUp Cnter" on the complete System Info screen said "21" when I first fired up the scope, and just a few starts later it said "114". I think it is miscounting, now it's showing "120" and I'm pretty sure I've restarted more than six times since the "114" count. (Restarts mostly due to the freezing Measurements issue.)
I've made some videos documenting these things but it may be tomorrow before the videos are ready to view.
Overall, I'm happy with the Rigol CS, and I do love the DS1054Z scope and I think that it will be really really great once the bugs are stamped out. This Measurement bug is something I've just been noticing, though, and I'd like to hear if anyone else has experienced the Measurements to stop working.
I've had no trouble with my probes, but I rarely use them at the 1x position. But my switches all seem to be working fine, without the plastic flash problem.