Issues with ZWO cameras

[malc-c]

I've just returned from visiting a friend who has a really strange issue when using ZWO120MM and MC camera's.  He has an AMD based laptop running windows 7, with 4GB ram, and up until now has been running his Avalon mount with EQMOD, imaging with his QHY5 via nebulosity 3, and guiding via PHD and a loadstar without issue.  However when he replaces the loadstar with either the colour or mono ZWO camera both Nebulosity and EQMOD end up not responding (EQMOD then reports a time out error) and have to be end tasked to close.  Occasionally it would blue screen with 000000FE as the stop code.

We've tried un-installing the hardware via device manager and installing the latest drivers for both the QHY5 and ZWO camera's, ASCOM is the latest version, both PHD1 and PHD2 tried (same results).  We can run Nebulosity and start an plan of exposures just fine, but as soon as we start looping in PHD things go awol.

We also tried an HP pavilion laptop which is running windows 8 (64bit) - again AMD based and with 4GB ram, but this time it wasn't possible to select the ZWO cameras as Device Manager flagged the device as CODE 10 - Couldn't start due to lack of resources.  Everything is pointing to these cameras as the cause, but surely a modern 3 GHz plus machine should be up to scratch to run these camera's?  We even used the USB3 port on the HP machine so bandwidth shouldn't be a problem.  One thing that has been suggested is an incompatibility with AMD chipsets and that these cameras work best on Intel based machines... if so why would this not be stated in the advertising or point of sale.

Has anyone else had any similar experience, or could suggest a fix for my friend.

[knobby]

Hi Malc, in the absense of any other replies can I suggest having a dig around the ZWO forum, Sam is pretty helpful on there.

http://zwoug.org/viewforum.php?f=21&sid=bb048a629aa5a520f8d2352dbc2cad53

good luck

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

I have had no issues with the ZWO cameras, which seem to run happily on my old Win XP VAIO SZ2 (ANCIENT, Core duo machine with "just" 2G RAM), and on a Win8 Laptop (fairly new lenovo, Core i5, 4GB RAM)

[malc-c]

Thanks for the post.  I think my friend has put a post up on the ZWO forum.

[riklaunim]

Also USB3 are not compatible in most cases. AMD chipsets can have in general problems with various machine vision camera platforms. Did those two computers have the same chipset/CPU family?

[CharlesW]

There is a specific problem with AMD chips and ZWO cameras. They are oil and water. I worked through this identical problem last fall and the only solution was to sell my AMD laptop to my brother in law and buy an Intel machine. Sorry, there is no work around.

[malc-c]

There is a specific problem with AMD chips and ZWO cameras. They are oil and water. I worked through this identical problem last fall and the only solution was to sell my AMD laptop to my brother in law and buy an Intel machine. Sorry, there is no work around.

If that is the case, then why is this not stated in any of the advertising.  It would save people a lot of money and frustration