Had problems with mine awhile back, like 3 or 4 years ago...
Do you have any 'Temperature monitoring' or 'CPU monitoring' software running in the background?
My problem was (and it took me almost a year to figure this out) every time one of these programs would try to do an update (i.e. read a CPU temp, read a fan speed, etc), it would kick out my programmer software and dump somehow. And it was really sporadic since my 'monitoring software' would only do a read every minute, so I suppose I would get errors about 50% of the time because it usually takes less than a minute to program a PIC.
One day, for some reason, I decide to change my update rate to something like every 10 seconds. (Important point that I missed for about a year: Most of the time, it takes far less than a minute to program a PIC, but it almost always takes more than 10 seconds to program one). After I made that change, nothing worked, for about a month.
After awhile, again for some unknown reason, I decided to shut off all my monitoring programs (I haven't made the connection between the 2 events yet), everything started working great. It just didn't add up.
About 2 weeks after that, my girlfriend used my laptop and shut it off instead of putting it in standby like I always do.
Well, the reboot put the 'monitoring software' back into the '10 seconds between reads' mode and neither of my programmers worked again.
Now I made the connection... Every time the laptop's 'monitoring software' would read the CPUs temp or Fan speeds or whatever, it would cause my Warp13a OR my EPIC to error out at the exact moment that it was trying to do the read.
Funny thing is, this has only happened on my laptops, never on my desktops.
I don't know why, I don't care. I just run a clean system now without a crapload of stuff running in the tray.
Bookmarks