"Ask Joe"   Archive

Q: I recently replaced an old computer for my Collage-S system. I have Collage version 2.3. When I reinstalled the Collage software, I discovered that the new computer only has USB ports, so I couldn't plug in the Collage dongle. I bought an add-in card with a parellel port, and plugged in the Collage dongle but the Collage software still doesn't run.

A: It sounds like the parallel port card you have doesn't support the driver software needed for the Collage dongle. You will need to find a parallel port card which does support the dongle you have.

You could try uninstalling the hardlock driver and re-installing it. Also, download the latest version of the driver from www.aladdin.com

In version 3.0, Collage moved to a USB dongle, instead of the old parallel port dongles, because modern computers ship without any parallel ports.

One of the reasons we recommend upgrading Collage is to keep up with changes in computer hardware and operating systems.

Q: We have archived and removed all of the old jobs from our Collage, however, several old jobs still appear on the server in our RTI.  If you try to engrave one of these old jobs, the RTI gives you an error message.  It isn't really a big deal, but it is a bunch of clutter to have to navigate through in order to find the jobs that we are working on at the time. Any advice on how to finish cleaning out the server would be great!

A: Joel Taylor, Daetwyler Customer Support says: Set all jobs on your system "Not Ready For Print." Browse to your clsdata folder (for Collage-S and Collage-E, this is on the C drive; with a client-server system, this is a mapped drive). Open the layouts folder. Delete the contents of this folder (not the folder itself). Now you can set your jobs Ready for Print and you should be in business with the phantom cylinders now gone.

Q: We converted a CCS optical disk to CD. The CCS archive CD fails to read into Collage using the CCS Archive Reader. How do we get these jobs into Collage?

A: The CCS Opto2CD program does a raw copy of data from the optical drive and creates a CD burnable iso file. If the optical disk has errors the errors will also be copied resulting in an unreadable CD.

Try the rebuild directory function twice (first time checks, second time fixes) in the CCS optical archive window - then recreate the CD.

If the CD is still unreadable the data must be completely read into CCS from optical and then the archive must be written using the CDR-1000A software option (traditional CCS archiving). Be careful not to select more than 256 objects (jobs, cylinders and images) in the CCS archive window or the window will immediately crash. You will likely discover exactly which job is corrupt when you attempt to read the job into CCS.

Be sure you are using the latest version of Collage software (version 3.0) when reading CCS archives as our current software handles more CCS errata than previous versions.

Daetwyler recommends converting all CCS data to Collage as soon as possible as CCS hardware is becoming more and more difficult to support. Daetwyler R&D offers a CCS to Collage data conversion service -- contact Joel Taylor or Joel Huff at Daetwyler R&D for details.