BridgePal Forum

Sounds interesting - thanks.

Well, after a sample of one session, that problem appears to have been resolved!  Thanks very much for the tip, John

As far as I can tell, our problem is a Windows 10 issue - but it briefly adversely affects the running of the BridgePals system. 

Every Club session, without fail, we encounter terrible response issues that tend to last only about 5 - 10 minutes, usually when we reach round two or three when using a 2-board movement.  What appears to happen is that while everyone in the room is occupied with bidding and playing, not much traffic is being generated on the scoring devices, and the laptop concludes that the system is (near) idle so it kicks off some really irritating background process that hogs the processing power and causes a room-wide BridgePals freeze.  Whatever it is that causes it is relatively quick, such that for most of the evening the system runs really smoothly and very well.

We did spot that Windows Defender was starting a scan ten minutes or so into the session, because one had not been run for a long time.  After numerous attempts to stop Windows Defender completely, we 'compromised' with the operating system by routinely manually running a Defender Scan before the club session starts.  They only take 5 minutes, but once they're done, it doesn't try to do one again during the evening. [That can be checked by looking at the report on the last run, which says that it was completed at somewhere around 7.15 p.m. - our sessions start at 7.30.

I don't think our problem is caused by Defender scans, but it is by something equally annoying.  The laptop's apps are completely stripped down to the bare essentials.  We have no other AV software installed, apart from Malwarebytes Free, which only runs on demand. Our Laptop has oudles of RAM given what we expect of it.  Through System Settings, the machine has been told that 'the working day' is from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. and not to check for / run Windows Updates during this working day.

I'd be very interested to know whether anyone else faces, or faced, the same problem, and if so how / whether they have solved it.

Hi John

Thanks for your helpful thoughts.

Your message 'crossed in the post' with an update from me, thus:

I looked through the release notes as to what should happen by installing the newest versions of BridgePal Services / Packages: none of it had happened.  I decided to try to install both components manually via downloads from the BridgePals website.  Both installations popped up with a message to the effect that Windows Defender thought the app was insecure and therefore they wouldn't be run. I told both to 'install anyway' - and, hey presto - problem solved!  When I earlier ran the upgrade from the BridgeScore Upgrade menu, BridgeScore itself updated without issues, but Server / Services appeared to have worked - no error messages / Defender warnings - but in practice they didn't do anything.

So the issue / resolution appears to be that if you are using Windows 10 Professional then the nice convenient Upgrade option for Server / Services doesn't work and you need to download from the website.

Alaric

PS By the way, I am a great fan of these latest enhancements - thanks very much for doing them.

Hi John (and John)
If the problem is a shortage of memory, have you tried uninstalling / disabling whatever superfluous apps that you can? Android won't let you uninstall useless system-supplied apps but you can uninstall anything that has been manually installed, and you can disable quite a lot else, such as the camera. Also, are you able to check whether there are any miscellaneous apps running? I think 4.1.1 is new enough to include the feature that allows you to view all running apps in a set of cascading tiles, and to close anything that doesn't need to be running. Look for a 'Square' icon at the bottom of the screen, press it, and see what it reveals.

Alaric

(Mountnessing Bridge Club)

Thanks.  Problem now solved.  It seems that B****y Microsoft have been back at work again.  I hadn't noticed that when the Spring Update to Windows 10 was installed it reverted the language settings back to English (US) and that also limited the offered date formats such that it wasn't possible to select dd/mm/yyyy for short dates.  I re-created last night's XML file and it now includes <DATE>23/08/2018</DATE> rather than the original <DATE>23-08-2018</DATE>

When we submit P2P files, the EBU end of the process always asks us to enter the date of the session manually.  I know for other clubs the system just 'picks up' the date from the original Event set-up as one would expect.  Any idea why this is happening to us?

I gave it a very worthy 5 stars some while ago.