Help required with Railmaster set up

[KPJunk]

Help with Railmaster set up 

Hi everyone , I have got into a real mess with my Railmaster set up and would appreciate any suggestions before I contact Railmaster Support .

 

I had been running Railmaster Pro on Win 7 & 8 for several years without any problems at all.

 

I upgraded to Win 10 a few months ago and seem to have lost everything , some through probably   my own stupidity of not taking a back up of railmaster.

 

I have accepted that I will have to reenter all my 30+ locos and many points again once i get a stable version running.

 

I always upgrade to the latest version of railmaster as soon as it is available and currently on 1.64 from the Horny railmaster forum.

 

The problem is that despite Railmaster closing seemingly correctly after I have gone through the install stage , it always goes back to the install screens after closing and reopening  and I have to start again .

 

When going through the install screens , some of the functionality is missing so I then have to start from rm.setup again.

 

I then have to manually set to Com 4 again etc .

 

Initially the internet is active but I recently noticed that after the Elite is set to Com  4 the internet is inactive 

 

Because it is inactive I cannot send any info from the internal help screens to railmaster support .

 

My activation code is retained every time.

 

Has anyone come across this before and are there any suggestions to try .

 

The internet works normally on the pc .

 

I have always used Microsoft Essentials for Internet security without any problems elsewhere 

 

I have also reread the manual , the stickies on this forum and AC help on installing with Windows 10 

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

Regards

 

Keith 

 

[96RAF]

Are you,using admin rights to,install it and have you saved your trackplan as something else to the default plan name, else RM will load their default plan, thus overwriting your version. Your plan must be a different name like myplan1.pln.

[KPJunk]

Hi RAF96

Thanks for replying . I always use admin rights on both install and when running program.

Re the plans , I have to date amended the default track plan and saved as a different name as well as overwriting the default track plan. Either way makes no difference.

Keith 

[RB51]

Sorry to be pedantic, and before you spend too much more time on what is clearly a faulty install, can we just make sure you have the latest version - i.e. 1.64 Revision 1? If you are not sure how to check that please ask.

 

If you do have that version I would suggest you contact HRMS using the contact form from within the page accessed by the "?" tab.

 

If you don't have that version, please install it and come back.

 

R-

[KPJunk]

Hi RogerB

I dont mind helpful people being pedantic and many thanks for the reply . 😀

I did say in the thread "I always upgrade to the latest version of railmaster as soon as it is available and currently on 1.64 from the Hornby railmaster forum." which of course is V1.64 Rev 1.

I also said 

"Initially the internet is active but I recently noticed that after the Elite is set to Com  4 the internet is inactive  Because it is inactive I cannot send any info from the internal help screens to railmaster support ." and also said Internet is not a problem elsewhere  The one thing I did not make clear was that Railmaster has always been enabled  for both Private and Public groups  on the network exceptions. Any other suggestions before I email railmaster support . RegardsKeith  

 

[RB51]

Hi KPJ, I did read your post and appreciate that I may have created the impression that I had not done so properly, or had misunderstood or ignored the points you were making. In my defense, I offer the following.

 

You did not say when you had downloaded the update and although likely, from the way you expressed yourself in your text, that you were indeed up to date, there was no "of course" about it in my mind. It seemed prudent to check.

 

As to the internet connection would it not be possible to contact HRMS via the settings page whilst on a comm port other than "4" - as this seems to disable the connection? The benefit of doing so from within the program is that a log of your system status is also sent which is helpful for HRMS in analysing your problems. 

 

I am not completely clear as to the full range of your issues and rather than try to deal with them piecemeal, it would perhaps be best to contact HRMS support in any way you can manage.

 

Please let us know how you get on - you seem to have a complicated set of issues there.

 

R-

[KPJunk]

Thanks Roger , I completely understand where you are coming from . I was a systems administrator, built pc's etc etc   for x years and despite end users always being perfect I very rarely got beat  , but this one has and it has taken me ages to admit I need further advice !!!.

I have even thought about completely trashing the hard drive and starting again as I really only use the pc in the loft for Railmaster and who knows that may in the end may save me time.

I would rather contact Support via the application as I know this helps with the diagnostics and thanks for the suggestion of trying to send before I set up com port 4 when the internet appears as active.

In the meantime if anyone has any further suggestions it would be greatly appreciated

Keith 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[St1ngr4y]

Are you sure it's the Internet which is inactive? My Railmaster always says my Elite is inactive, even though everythging is working fine. Did you actually try to send a message to HRMS  through RM?

Ray

[Fishmanoz]

Can we assume you've checked via Device Manager that the Elite is in fact connected to comm4, not just set that way in Setup?

 

And do you have all of the correct lines in your ini file for W10 and Elite?

 

The fundamental issue here is that upgrading to W10 shouldn't have done anything to RM, it all should still be there including your resources.mdb file with all of your locos and your track plans etc, all of which are also unaffected by installing RM updates.  The only issues after installing W10 are the initial setup things I mentioned, plus you should also check everything in the Setup screen.  But from what you've said, something else strange seems to be at play so contacting HRMS and arranging to have them log in remotely is probably going to be your best option. 

 

If if you do that, watch what they do and report back please, will be interesting to know.

[Augustus Caesar]

Hi KPJ

 

As Fishy has asked before me are you keeping the port number in RM identical to that setup in Device Manager? As you say you have built systems in the past so maybe you already know about that.

 

What I also point out though is that even moving the cable to a different USB port each time you start the PC or Elite (or eLink) you are changing the port number in Device Manager. RM though remembers only its manual setting. If you are NOT swapping the cable to another port on the PC then that should be OK generally.

 

These questions are eliminating one by one scenarios that will eventually give the correct answer toyou as you will know wlaready. So keep firing away...

 

I'm glad I am able to be back on here after holidays and a couple of subsequent illnesses where I have done little but now have loads to catch up on.  We'll get your answer eventually once each area is dealt with and eliminated.

 

With the upgrade to W10 are you on v1511 or v1607 of that OS? The latter, as you may know, threw a lot of USB gear into a right old tizzy but quite a lot of that was user configs anyway... still, better to know what we are looking at with you here...

[96RAF]

Device manager will not ID your Elite as an Elite like it did in earlier versions on Windows, but if you hot plug /unplug it with Device Manage open you can see which port opens/closes as you do it.

 

[KPJunk]

Thanks again RAF96 

 I had already checked device manager and Com 4 is always being reused if I remove the usb cable whilst on.

I have had to email HRMS as the internal help will not send despite saying active before going inactive.

Thanks everyone else so far , I will let you how I get on with HRMS and what was needed to fix 

Keith 

[KPJunk]

Hi everyone    I  hope  that the problem is now resolved !  

After several email exchanges with HRMS , I have managed to recover Railmaster  

many checks were carried out and the following changes appeared to be successful :  

Changing  the folder  permissions on some users e.g. ALL to Full control including sub folders and files

The Railmaster folder was set to read only .  

When these changes had been applied with a clean reboot , my own original track plan magically appeared ,

I have since set up one loco as a test and then exited and was able to restart Railmaster as expected at last .  

How or why Railmaster changed its permissions after win 10 install will be a mystery .  

Unfortunately , my original resources.mdb has been lost  but at least I am up and running . 

  I must ensure I make a regular backup of resources.mdb as a minimum so that I don’t have to reenter approx 30 loco dcc settings .  

i am really looking forward to the weekend now when I will at last be able to spend some quality time using Railmaster.   I would like to thank everyone and of course HRMS who have helped me to resolve the problem 

keith

[RDS]

Thanks Keith, for both the comprehensive way you first described the problem and the detailed explanation you have provided as to how it was solved.

[Fishmanoz]

That's still weird KPJ but glad it has been fixed.  The thing is though that RM will not in any way change its permissions, nor will a W10 upgrade.  Imagine the havoc that would be caused across all programs if W10 changed permissions, and there is no rational for it doing it to just RM.

 

It seems to me that the only way that this could have happened would be some outside intervention.  As one possibility, you didn't at any time copy the whole RM folder somewhere, then paste the whole thing back did you?

[Augustus Caesar]

Trouble is here with Windows 10 in that some updates have caused issues with permissions on certain machines. Rollouts of updates are not consistent across the board with MS at this point in time and thus some users will get errors before others.

 

OneDrive is one default program that causes many upsets in W10 and thus I disable it from running at all times (easily done within its own settings). Quite why anyone saves data to the cloud or these areas on other companies servers is beyond me... all you need is an external drive and backup data to that... thus you don't run the risk of their servers being ploughed to high heaven by hackers looking for your data.

 

MS are in the middle of a huge program of lock downs on their W10 system where vulnerabilities are concerned. One major one last year was where the old copy protection on games CD's/DVD's of the late nineties and early eighties (Securom and Starforce for example) was found by users who were running these games on W7 or W8 were suddenly getting messages with things like they would have to run the game with Administartor rights to continue... er... what? Basically, W10 came with a specific piece of code which would kill the processes of these games immediately thus the protection code would be classed as malicious... which is precisely what MS intended. They then extended that to W7 and W8 alst year. So these games require a hack to run. Either that or run a batch file (which I do) to kill the MS update and run the game and then restart the rpocess when the game closes down.

 

It is being bandied about that some permissions on folders within Program Files /(86) are now being targeted - if this IS the case just simply uninstall the update from the PC and away you go... but you need to change permissions back to their default.

 

In no way am I suggesting this happening to all but some are commenting loudly in forums so there may well be an element of truth in it. Maybe this caused to the permission change you see when RM failed to run properly. There may be other casues but these would be pretty rare. As Fishy says copying and pasting could cause this as permissions would need to be written upon installation of the program and not as and when copied. There again it depends upon your default or manual install folder....

 

Just something to think about....

[Fishmanoz]

Wow AC, thanks for that update.  A question though, how do you turn off OneDrive, I'm getting sick of its login screen popping up every time I boot?

[Augustus Caesar]

Hi Fishy... this is really simple. On the taskbar and near your clock you will find the icon for OneDrive, possibly hidden in the little notification area, and all you do is right click the icon and open OneDrive's settings from the popup menu.

 

In the Settings tab simply remove the check or tick from the box/s but especially the one which says "Start OneDrive automatically when I sign in to Windows". Then click OK to close that process and set the option.

 

GTo kill OneDrive for your current session in Windows and immediately AFTER the operation above simply right click the OneDrive icon again and then click Exit.

 

No more running OneDrive in the background when Windows boots up. You can't uninstall the program entirely (I hate the word app... just a modern day shortcut like everything else for 'lazy' youngsters and geeks who can't say full words like application or program and like making stuff sound cool and fresh and modern!!).

 

That should do it... If the icon is not available in the first place just run the program and follow the instructions above... in YOUR case Fishy if it is annoying then the icon should be available.

 

Let me know how you got on... 😎

[KPJunk]

The comment below is from HRMS as a final response to my Railmaster problem . It also added a reminder about the back up facility within the pro pack 

' Windows 10 does some very odd things for some users!Did you know that there is a data backup facility in the Pro-Pack.  This will allow you to quickly and efficiently back up all your entered data onto, for example, a USB memory stick.

[RDS]

Thanks for the One Drive tip AC.  I have used W10 successfully for about 5 months now and I have not noticed any activity from One Drive.  However, I hate the sound of 'the cloud' for the reasons you describe and I have now removed the tick, that apparently was allowing it to run on each start up.

[Fishmanoz]

Thanks AC, simple and worked a treat.  

[Augustus Caesar]

No probs re the OneDrive tip guys... there are a few privacy issues with Windows 10 and also applications running in the background.

 

Here's a link to the Privacy Settings area for Windows 10 on my Help Site which offers guidance for you to be able to turn off features that send data to MS and other vendors when it is not really necessary or important for you to do so. Please read the first column of text as this explains my reasoning for posting this help guide on site.

http://octaviancs.com/railmaster/windows10privacy.php?id=windows10privacy

 

I am considering another page which will help members to turn off applications like OneDrive that don't need to run in the background and thus take up system resources... some of you already know how to do some of this but for those who don't just let me know here and I will consider it further. Keep in mind that although not highly likely it IS possible that resources can in fact slow other programs down quite a bit and thus cause problems if shared .dll files are being used for example by more than one program.

 

For those who are just using a laptop with Windows 10, for example, purely for RailMaster alone then this will help as no other applications will be required to run in the background at all. Each time a system is switched on these programs are running and probably constantly passing data through ports to the outside world. This will be browsing and habitual data though and not files or their content unless you have malicious content ion your systems. My motto is... my data is mine and mine alone and for my eyes only... so you there you have it! 😆

 

It should also be oted that not ALL data can be stopped from being transmitted and nor can some programs be stopped fro running at start up and some cannot be deleted from your system at all. The new page will say what these are if required.....

[RB51]

I for one would appreciate that sort of assistance AC. R-

[96RAF]

I'm with Rog on that.

I'm computer savvy but not too proud to ask for help like now:

... when AC might like to email me via link in hand with assistance  about a wee problem I'm having upgrading a Raid 1 enbled XP MCE laptop to Win 7 Home  Premium and losing the raid Due to driver problems....

Rob

[Augustus Caesar]

@Roger, @RAF

 

I will get started on this as soon as possible given I am recovering from illness and have tons of work to catch up on. It will give me a break from the mundane if you like... so keep a look out.

 

@RAF

Re the XP MCE laptop... I have communicated via e-mail to your good self and require a couple of pieces of info outlined in said mail. I will get back to you when I hear back from that... it's not a difficult fix. :-)