CdC seems quite resource intensive - Can I change settings?

[swag72]

I'm running quite an elderly PC in my observatory - What's 8 years or so between friends afterall?!! I've only got the minimum on there and it generally copes very well. I was looking at Task Manager last night and some time after I'd restarted it and opened CdC and Maxim, CdC was chugging away as the most resource intensive programme running. It wasn't working at the time, no slews, goto's etc.

My question is have I missed a setting somewhere or got something switched on that makes it so resource intensive?

[opticalpath]

Hi Sara. What version are you running? I wonder if V3 is more resource intensive. I used to run V2.76 on an ancient laptop (I mean really old .... I think it was 266 MHz and 284 KB RAM!) to drive GOTO on the telescope and to run the imaging camera and/or DSLR ..... with no problems at all. Not that that helps you much!

Adrian

[opticalpath]

Sorry, last post wasn't very helpful! I'm not aware of any settings that could have a dramatic effect on CPU usage, Sara. I suppose you might get CPU spikes if you set the View/ Blink Picture option on, or maybe if you set the clock to update every 1 second or something but even that unlikely setting wouldn't explain it, I think. To investigate:

What is CdC doing when you see high usage - driving telescope, connecting to Internet .... etc?

Is it doing anything that might update the display rapidly?

Is the high CPU usage constant or spikey?

I would try a few things to narrow down the problem:

- run the program stand-alone, not connected to telescope and not connected to Internet. Do some stuff offline and see what CPU looks like.

- If running V3, try de-selecting display of the various object types (stars, deep-sky, comets, asteroids etc) in case it's trying to recalculate positions every few seconds.

- If CPU is high even when you're not doing much, do a cold restart and try again.

All else fails, try posting a question on the Skychart (aka CdC) Yahoo group.

Adrian

[Merlin66]

Sara,

I have a REALLY old Acer laptop in the observatory.

I typically run CDC (V3.8), Astroplanner (V2.1), PHD (1.13) and AstroArtV5 with little or no problems...

[swag72]

How rude of me not to respond earlier to this - Thanks for that info Adrian. I will certainly give that a go when I next get out. We're suffering from a bit of cloud at the moment. And thanks for letting me know that the elderly PC's cope OK, Ken!!

[kirkster501]

I am running CdC, EQMod, AT, PHD, Artemis Capture and AVG antivirus all on a Dell 630 which is about 7 years old under Windows 7. All latest versions. I am at about 5% CPU. So all this astro field software is very light on the CPU. It was the same with XP too.

Hope that sets some expecation?

Steve