Build 7046 hangs Windows 7
There is a posting concerning Build 6029 of True Image Home 2010 that has several hundred entries. The temporary fix was to apply SnapAPI. The permanent fix is the release of Build 7046.
Unfortunately, this new build does not fix the problem.
I installed True Image Home (TIH) 2010 build 7046 with the Plus Pack on my Windows XP SP2 system. At first the timed backups did not seem to be working and there was an error message. Tech Support said to uninstall the software, download a fresh copy, and re-install. They provided a link to SnapAPI 545 and AcronisReport.exe but did not tell me what to do with them.
A reply to Tech Support remains unanswered, as does a follow-up note I sent to both Tech Support and Sales Support concerning the lack of support. The next day the timed backup began working by itself so I did not re-install the program.
A few weeks ago I re-formatted my hard drive and installed Windows 7 Home Premium. I installed my major programs and all was well. After a few days I installed some utility programs and all was well. Bit by bit I restored the software to the system and Windows 7 ran with virtually no problems.
Right after I installed TIH 2010 and the Plus Pack I started having troubles with Adobe Flash 10.1 and IE8. Flash continually wanted to be re-installed and the browser would crash. According to thousands of hits on Google this is not uncommon. The problem changed from the browser crashing to one of the machine not responding for 5 minutes at a crack.
When the system was still working some sound features would stop working. The NIC would also lose its IP address. The system has two NICs and when the problem would occur neither one could pick up an IP address.
A check of Google showed that Flash and IE8 and Windows 7 64 bit did not like each other. There were also reports that a recent update for the sound chip in my system could cause problems. I switched to IE8 32 bit and all seemed OK for a short while. I rolled back the sound chip driver and things were OK again, for a short while.
When the system became totally unusable I installed Google Chrome and things started working again. Then Chrome started hanging. To make matters more fun attempts to roll Windows back to a point prior to some Windows critical updates would fail.
Each time the system ran for a few minutes after a reboot and then began bogging down. After 5-10 minutes it had to be hard booted because it could not be shut down. Safe mode worked fine. The system event logs showed nothing obvious.
I disabled the Acronis services and rebooted. The system has been working with either browser and I am not having problems with crashes. Sound is up and running and the NIC is happy again.
The problem seems to be with TIH 2010. Build 7046 was supposed to fix these problems but it has not done so. Given that there is no technical support at Acronis I am hoping to find a solution in this forum.
The problems now appear to be resolved.
An Acronis official contacted me after reading these postings. He got me in touch with a technician who had some problems understanding what was wrong. I sent him copies of my communications with all of the technicians involved in this case and he was not happy with the way it was going. He is working with the support staff to improve their operations.
He referred the problem to a 2nd level technician who handled the problem very well. We could not do a remote session because his Webex was down. I checked with another company's Webex and it, too, was down so the problem was not with Acronis.
There were two major problems: 1), Jobs run to the Acronis Zone would bomb out almost immediately and, 2), the non-stop backup feature was causing my system to crawl after about ten minutes. Well, maybe "ooze" is a better word; the machine was unusable until I disabled the non-stop backup service.
The 2nd level technician sent me a utility to check the jobs that were scheduled and explained how to use it. I found six jobs scheduled even though my screen displayed only two. Four had odd names. I was probably trying to run a corrupted job without knowing it. I asked if he had seen the sorts of problems I was encountering before and he said he had not, and that this version ran very well under Windows 7 with the new SnapAPI he sent me.
After we finished the call I checked my installation and found that while I had specified the D drive for the installation it had installed on both C and D. The split installation plus the job corruption problem led me to do a re-install, this time to the C drive. As a precaution I ran the scheduler utility with the option to kill all jobs and it appeared to remove every trace of them.
I removed the program, re-booted, and then re-installed the program, along with the new SnapAPI. I also re-installed the Plus Pack. The system came up normally and did not bog down as before. I was able to schedule jobs to the Acronis Zone and to other drives. Five of my six jobs have been running reliably. The non-stop backup has run several sessions.
The sixth job protects a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. It must back up file by file since the drive is not directly attached to the computer. This is a problem with any NAS device, not just with Acronis. I did learn a while back not to run backups to this device as Acronis does not like reading from it.
The first backup is running as I write this note. In perhaps 30 minutes it has protected 25% of about 200 gig, which is far faster than it has ever run. It used to take 1-2 days to run this job before I upgraded to Windows 7 and Acronis 2010.
If anything further of note comes up I will post a follow-up here. Many thanks to Acronis for coming through to get things working as designed.
Let's hope this official can get the Tech Support people on the ball, and back in the same universe with the rest of us. Their product is good when it works. The support needs work, and that may be in progress.