Good Morning Everyone. We have a problem here which is causing everyone fits so I thought I would ask around and see if anyone here had a similar problem and/or a solution to offer.

We recently purchased a Waters Alliance 2695 system with the PDA 2996. We currently run Millennium32 version 3.05.01. Our problem is I have to reboot the LACE daily to allow connection to this instrument. The error message reads "Error 12033 connecting to Chromatography System; OLE Fatal Error."

Also, during a run where PDA data is collected, the connection between instrument and LACE is lost after 5-6 injections and the following error message pops up: "This action cannot be completed because the other program is busy. Choose 'Switch To' to activate the busy program and correct the problem." When 'Switch To' is picked, the connection is lost and attempts to reconnect cause the first error message ('Error 12033...') to pop up.

We have not been able to get any help from Waters as our software version is two revisions behind the newest version and they only support one revision behind the newest version. So far I have changed IP addresses for the instrument and detector, replaced the IEEE cables, and had the firmware for the instrument upgraded from v3.0 to v3.1. I am all out of ideas.

Can anyone shed some light on this please? Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Hi,
I'm near to buy new Agilent HP 1100 ( UV detection) and I currently run Waters Millenium 32 version 4.0. This software can theorically drive a HP 1100 system. But, does anybody have a bad or good experiance about HP 1100 system driven by Millenium 32 ?? Is there some applications on the system not driven by Millenium version 4.0 (Maintenance diagnosis ????, compression factor???)
Best regards

You are not trying hard enough with Waters. Call your sales rep directly, tell them how unhappy you are and get them working on the problem. Many times this type of approach is much more productive than the 1-800 number....

Dear Anon #2,

I tried that already and it was reinforced that unless I upgrade to a newer version (they suggested 4.0), they can't help me. Any other thoughts?

Dave

Something in your software may be corrupt. Back up all your Millennium project files, and try a reinstall. This will be time consuming, but will be cheaper than purchasing the new Millennium 4.0, if it works, that is.

Dear David,

Did you suggest to the sales rep that you were considering sending the instrument back and looking into other options (ie Agilent/Shimadzu).

David,
Call the salesman again and tell him you want to speak to his direct manager. When the manager calls,tell him how unacceptable this situation is.You should also get your company's purchasing group involved. Sounds like they are pulling the ostrich routine. Be sure and tell them how great you hear the Agilent system is too.

David,

Do you also use the LACE as a general purpose workstation? That is do you also use the LACE to reprocess data, etc. If you do try to use the LACE just for acquisition - NT is not the most stable system around.

When you get the error press ctrl+alt+delete then click on Task Manager then click on the Processes tab. Check to see if there is there is a process that is consuming all of the processor cycles. We are having a problem with the process monitor running away like this and crashing our Millennium 4.0 clients and acquisition servers. Waters has provided no help.

Anon 1,

We have switched 10 1100's to control by Millennium 4.0. I would not recommend this setup to anyone but our competitors. 4.0 does not support any of the diagnosis or qualification features. The 1100 control in Millennium 4.0 has a denpendency on MSXML 3.0 so you cannot run current versions of Internet Explorer on the same computer as Millennium client. This could also impact you if you are using XML based document management systems. Millennium does not support the current 1100 firmware. We are having the client crashes described above with no help from Waters. You can change the 1100 parameters from the hand held controller and this does not get logged anywhere in Millennium. There is no software support for calibration or OQ/PV of the 1100's. I could go on but you get the point.

Dear Tom:

A recent service pack for 4.0 solves this issue (and others):
"You can change the 1100 parameters from the hand held controller and this does not get logged anywhere in Millennium"

Dear Tom and all Anons,

Thanks for all your help and input. In a last ditch effort I checked the data that had been collected - each PDA file was about 1 MB. I knew they were large, but not that large. So, I then looked at the table space allotted for the project and it was set to 10 MB. See where I'm going with this? I changed the table space from 10 to 100 MB and collected 12 injections successfully and lost no connection to the instrument. It seems strange that no error message stating 'insufficient table space' popped up - I've seen those messages previously with projects where only UV data was collected.

Anyway, hopefully this will help anyone else experiencing similar problems. However, if we continue to see similar problems, I'll let you know.

Dave