QHY GPS Log File and Computer Crash?

[RichKnox]

Background:
A few nights back I had my QHY174mGPS camera on a Celestron C8 w/Hyperstar connected via a Pegasus Astro Pocket Power Box Advance to SharpCap 4.1.12693.0 running on a HP I-5 laptop with 8 GB ram and SSD hard drive. The ZWO AM5 ASCOM utility, Stellarium 25.2, the Pocket Powerbox app, and the CelestronFocusUtility were also running. I had been taking some test exposures for an impending asteroid occultation but finally settled on using 100 mSec exposures at 480 gain with a 1280 x 1024 ROI. I had also set SharpCap to capture the GPS log file. The computer is a former Win10 that I had run the Win11 upgrade on a few months back.

Problem:
For about 40 minutes I was just letting everything run and waiting to start a SER movie capture of the occultation. At some point I noticed Stellarium had become unresponsive so I restarted it. Then 5 minutes before the occultation the computer crashed and had to be rebooted and all the software applications restarted. I barely managed to get going in time to start data capture on the occultation.

This was the first time I had turned on GPS data logging. Maybe just a coincidence, but it was also the first time my computer had ever totally crashed during a session. The GPS logging had been running from 07:55:59 UT til 09:45:13 UT when the computer crashed. The log file was 15,684 KB.

Question:
Have there been any issues encountered doing what I was trying to do?

[admin]

Hi Rich,

I've not heard of any similar problems related to the GPS logging - that's a fairly simple feature that just writes content to what is essentially a text file. The rate of writing is pretty small when compared to writing the frame image data to SER or FITS, so it's not even really going to stress the computer significantly compared to the rest of the things you are doing.

A full on Windows crash or freeze is usually caused by a problem in the operating system itself, or in a driver for some hardware - normal user applications like Stellarium or SharpCap don't run with enough privileges to cause the operating system to fail (unless they happen to ask the operating system or a driver to do something and there is a bug in that driver that is triggered by the request).

Windows has a 'Reliability History' tool that you can run (press Windows key, then start typing 'Reliability') - that would likely show up your issue as a 'Windows Failure', and clicking on the 'X' for that might give you more details that you can follow up.

cheers,

Robin

[RichKnox]

Thanks for the feedback. I will try your suggestion should I have another crash.

Richard