Thanks John, it could well be instrumental. I have seen lock-ups running the JEOL mapping but strangely it consistently runs longer before locking up than through PI (albeit with a small sample - it's very time consuming to test!). I'm hoping the logging will help diagnose if there's a consistent point of failure or if it is just random.
Hi Mike,
Well that clinches it. If both the JEOL and PI apps are locking up *at all*, then it's an instrument issue. The two apps have nothing else in common on the 8500 (and 8900/8200) as they both are talking directly to the JEOL system controller.
PI might "ping" the instrument a bit more than the JEOL mapping app, so that might explain why it might seem to take the JEOL app longer to trigger lockup, but this is almost certainly an instrument hardware or electronic issue.
Please do let us know what your service guys finds.
john
PS: Did you see these beautiful stage maps I did recently:
http://probesoftware.com/smf/index.php?topic=73.msg5130#msg5130If you were a sharpe eyed sort of person you might notice that the stage coordinates are in JEOL units! So how did that happen? Well silly me, I forgot to switch my config back to Cameca mode and so it (properly) calculated everything in JEOL coordinates and orientation when I quantified the maps!