OPOS MSR problems on SurePOS 500 running WEPOS

[porlob]

I'm having a weird issue that I'm hoping someone else has encountered or has some ideas on how to solve.

I manage POS equipment for a small hotel chain, and we use HSI in the restaurants (though I don't believe the problem is due to HSI).

I've recently been switching out Windows 2000 for WEPOS on our entire fleet of SurePOS 500 xx1 and xx2 machines. I've been going crazy trying to figure out why often, but not always, the NCR Mag Stripe Reader on these machines is not recognized by OPOS, and thus does not work.

Here are the facts:
- Problem did not occur prior to switch to WEPOS.
- Using serial NCR MSR with UPOS/OPOS 1.9
- Upon reboot, HSI automatically launches OPOS. the NCR MSR is not recofgnized by OPOS. This happens about 40% of the time, but there is no consistency from machine to machine or by any other identified factor.
- If the problem occurs, I can turn off OPOS and relaunch it and this restores functionality without exception.

Thoughts anyone?

[Henny]

Sounds like OPOS dependant services are not starting correctly or completely.

[kicker]

I experienced this problem before.  You should have HSI to update their INI file parameters for devices. 

[porlob]

Kicker: Thanks for your reply... So, what exactly was the problem you were experiencing? I'm just looking for a few more details in case you have them/care to share them. Did you experience this on WEPOS? What INI settings were changed?  I've spoken with HSI, and they seem pretty well stumped too.

I did find a workaround, but it is FAR from an idea solution: I thought that perhaps system resources were overburdened at startup, such that when HSI/OPOS started to load, there was some sort of communication failure... So, I wrote a batch script that delays the start of the HSI Launcher for about two minutes...

That does seem to avoid the problem, but I'm still looking for a more ideal solution.

Any more thoughts?

[Henny]

You did EXACTLY what was needed. The other dependencies need time to finish starting. Way to go! You could be a coder for SurePOS!