Raspberry Pi 4

@Clive Semmens: ¡Ya veo que entiendes! ¿Sabes hablar español? :)

Clive is a man of many talents!

@Steve Pampling: Because it’s funny to be called “mister nuts”, it’s like being called “mister big balls” I guess

We have an English colloquial expression meaning the best and finest referring to that part of a dog’s anatomy, “The Dog’s Bo**ocks”.

So I guess it’s an aspirational nickname!

@SeñorNueces ¿Sabes hablar español?

Muy poco, tristemente 8~(

@Rick – missed this earlier, stumbled on it now.¹

Steve – have you ever come across the case where XP just stops running tasks and generally slows to a complete stop? My graphics program and word processor worked, Firefox took forever to do anything, and asking Explorer to go into a new folder pops up the “doing something” spinny wotsit forever…?

Yup.
Many different reasons, one of which is a process MS use for checking the licence on Office (OSPPSVC.exe) it gets kicked into action when an MS app starts (but the default is to leave it running and it sometimes loses the plot and consumes silly large CPU – there’s a registry setting to set the time after the app (word, excel, powerpoint…) closes before it shuts down. Needless to say MS don’t do that as default.

There’s also a lot of scheduled tasks when you dig deep, Quite a lot of these are basically processes to gather info on what programmes you use and when, package up the info and send it to MS.
If you look at the list in Win7 it’s longer, and Win10 would have Rambo and the Terminator in tears.

¹ Work I can do dried up, there’s no big news from the US (other than further evidence that Trump is educationally sub-normal, so are most of his aides, and he’s started believing his own lies) So, look and check if I missed anything in recent weeks

@Steve Pampling: Because it’s funny to be called “mister nuts”, it’s like being called “mister big balls” I guess

The thing is, Morris got his radio call sign back in the days when we all had them picked for us, and the more embarrassing the better.
Mine, I am not going to put up here. Suffice to say the origin is related to a small gold cowbell worn around my neck since I was in school.

The OTG port will support a wider range of USB devices (it won’t be quite as picky as the XHCI driver).

Is this still the case?

And does it have any relevance to the current Community Support discussion about Raspberry Pi 4 crashing during intensive disc activity. My understanding is that the the Pi 4 in question has a USB hub connected to one of the 4 standard Pi USB ports. (Please correct me if I am wrong)

My USB hubs are still connected to the OTG ports (on two Pi 4s) and I see no problems with them (although my disc activity is much lower. I use RAMdisc for intensive actiity.

The Pi 4 I was having trouble with in the Raspberry Pi 4 crashing during intensive disc activity thread had the SATA adaptor plugged into a USB socket on a daughter-board which was connected not to any of the four standard USB sockets, but to the socket near to the HDMI sockets which you would connect the power to normally. The daughter-board had a separate socket to receive the power. So I think, if I understand the term correctly, that the SSD was connected to the OTG port.

Interesting. Thank you for that.

In the absense of any posts to the contrary (and your USB Hub being connected that way), it would appear that the On-The-Go port on the Pi 4 is still the best place to connect a USB Hub to the Pi 4.

It does mean that the normal power input connector for the Pi 4 cannot then be used as it shares the physical socket with the OTG port.

Which leads me to my next point which is that I had not realised that the USB to UART connector on my Waveshare USB hub could be used to power the Pi 4 via GPIO. But, I have now tried it and it works! although I still think that my Geekworm GPIO solution is a better option.

Finally, this all seems to rule out my earlier thought that your problems might be being caused by the use of a USB Hub connected to one of the four standard USB sockets on the Pi 4 main board.

So the question is, does the unreliability go away using the normal USB-A ports?

On the other thread I gave some details of my experiments. When I switched to using a different adaptor and a different drive on one of the standard USB ports (with the blue plastic inside, not the black – don’t know if that matters) the problems went away.

Next step, of course, was to try other combinations to see whether it was the port, the adaptor, or the drive which was unreliable.

I tried the first adaptor and drive in a standard USB port. No problems. Tried the second adaptor and drive in the OTG port. No problems. Then tried the first adaptor and drive back in the OTG port. Initially no problems but then got one more crash just before we had to travel to Bradford for the show. After the show went to my parents’ to deliver the machine. Copied old Iyonix hard drive onto new machine without problems. Sadly the machine hung once when I was not there to observe. Don’t know how it has been since as I had to come back home.

I’m hoping that if there is still a problem it will not manifest itself very much. My parents don’t tend to have the machine running for days on end processing many gigabytes of map data!