Date: Fri, 27 Oct 95 17:17:23 CDT
Subject: GSA meeting;service contracts; UPS; software problems
From:

Status: OR



SX50 users meeting at GSA meeting -- Nov 6 (Monday) -- 5 PM



There will be an announcement posted on the bulletin board that Monday

giving the location. Please look for it and come if you will be

attending the meeting in New Orleans.



++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

There will also be an SX50 users meeting at the SF AGU meeting for those

attending that meeting.



=============================



Date: Mon, 25 Sep 1995 08:38:56 -1000



From: garcia@mano.soest.hawaii.edu (Mike Garcia)



Another issue that Cameca was completely inflexible about was a new

service

contract. We tried to get them to offer a parts only (no service visit)

contract and they simply would not hear of it. They spent over 6 months

not

responding to us and then finally said it was not possible. We could not

afford a standard service contract and were looking for ways to continue

some kind of service contract with Cameca. They were unable or unwilling

to

consider anything but their standard service package. Thus, we are without

a service contract but they will swap boards and charge us for fixing ours.

We are in the Sweet years of our probe, so I do not expect to need their

help very often. We did not have a service contract on our old MBX for

many

years and were fine. However, the SX-50 has been a more difficult beast

for us.



On another matter, we recently bought a UPS and found that our troubles

with

boards hanging up decrease tremendously. Although Cameca does not

recommend

UPS, I think we made a serious mistake in not buying it when we got our

SX-50. It cost about $8 k.



Cheers, Mike Garcia

Department of Geology and Geophysics

University of Hawaii at Manoa

Honolulu, HI 96822

Voice (808)956-6641 FAX 956-2538



=========================================================================





I have been trying to make what I would think are slight modifications

to the quanti(view) software, to make it more "user friendly". After

a few hours of looking at the source code, I am not much closer to my

goal. If anyone out there has had any success, or perhaps has an older

version (Andy Davis says he thinks maybe the 'analysis date' may have been

a feature added at one point, but left off of later versions) with the

things I'm looking for in it, please let me know:



What I would like are



1) The date (and time even) of the (quanti) analysis, on the "raw"

printout.

The calibration printout has a starting and ending time of the calibration



and I can't even find in the code where that is called for.



2) Similiarly, having the analysis date on the "report" printout would be

great (now it just prints out the date of printout...which I can do

without).



3) Has anyone figured out (since Cameca sure hasn't!) how to correct the

"overwrite" default on the XYZ - automated mode analysis in Quantiview?

Cameca fixed that in the regular Quantiview "Analysis" this past release,

but I have had at least 2 users loose large amounts of data when they

inadvertently erased all their data by restarting XYZ to set up new lists

of points. I have again spent hours looking over the code, but that blasted

line escapes me!





--John Fournelle





John Fournelle

Electron Microprobe Lab Internet:johnf@geology.wisc.edu

Dept of Geology & Geophysics Office: (608) 262-7964

University of Wisconsin Lab: (608) 265-4798

1215 West Dayton Street Fax: (608) 262-0693

Madison, WI 53706 Amateur radio: WA3BTA/9

http://geology.wisc.edu/~johnf/sx51.html



"The first rule of all intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces."

Aldo Leopold