A Few Lessons to be Learnt!

Well this story will take some telling so I hope it can be a lesson for others.
I state that the reason that I find myself is thoroughly self inflected but there are some lessons to learn from this so perhaps it may save someone from the situation that I am currently in.

I have had my Vectrix since 2008 – it has been fantastic especially since The Laird improved the battery charging software so much. My bike has only 30,000 km’s and I know has a lot more to go. Without this it the batteries would now be dead.

A few weeks ago I had a little time at home and wanted to update my charger software – I was running one of the Lairds earlier versions that was still dong the EQ stage – not in itself a huge problem but this job takes literally 5 minutes so hey why not?

I got the latest version of the software – put it onto a memory stick transferred onto my old XP windows laptop and tried to upload the file. The diagnostics software crashed. What is going on here? Got another version of the diagnostics sotware – reformatted the hard drive, reinstalled an old version of XP, got new versions of the charger software and the same thing happened again! I tried 2 or 3 times and always the same thing kept happening. The diagnostics software kept crashing! In my frustration I picked an earlier battery charger version and it loaded without fault! What the hell?
Then the fans started and the display started doing some strange things – nothing that should be normally happening….
I spoke to the people on this board that know much more than I do and they asked what version of charger software did I load? It seems in my haste that I had loaded early Runke (Gold charger) software onto to my ESD (silver) charger. Shit!

But all the other (correct versions) of the charger software was crashing the diagnostics software!

After a lot of searching I found where the problem has been. I have been using a Macbook Pro for perhaps 3 or 4 years. I use Microsoft Outlook (for mac) for my mail program. Somehow – and I don’t understand how, the Mac has been corrupting the new charger files causing the diagnostic software to crash. As soon as I picked up the original mails on webmail from my old laptop then the diagnostic program no longer crashed and things worked – except for the charger, which now has been corrupted, with the wrong type of file.
When I try to reload the correct charger file I get the message “Did not receive DM15 for Access address: 0x2000”.

So the 2 lessons here are – for any bike programming DO NOT USE MAC COMPUTERS FOR ANYTHING. – RECEIVING FILES WHATEVER – THE WHOLE OPERATION SHOULD BE ON A WINDOWS MACHINE FROM RECEIVING MAIL TO UPLOADING THE FILES.
2Nd lesson - NO MATTER HOW FRUSTRATED YOU ARE BE CAREFUL WHAT FILE YOU UPLOAD – DON’T JUST TRY ANY SORT OF FILE OR YOUR BIKE CAN BE A DOOR STOP!

Ok, so it seems unless there are any really bright ideas from the forum that the charger is corrupted. The canbus all works fine I can upload ICM and Motor Controller files without problem.

Anyone have any suggestions if the charger program can be erased and then reinstalled?

Thanks for reading and I hope that it might save some other poor soul from having to go through this.

Jonathan