Native IDE on Windows 7 won't run.

[espruino-discuss3]

Posted at 2017-01-12 by jimgi

Hello, I am having problems getting the native Espruino IDE to load on my Windows 7 machine.
After clicking on the icon in the start menu, the application produces a white rectangle on my monitor (application splash screen). This then disappears and nothing else happens.
I have looked at my antivirus and checked that it is not blocking the native IDE, and it appears OK (even turned off AVG protection entirely - still no joy).
Does anyone have any idea as to what might be happening?
Regards,
Jimgi

[espruino-discuss3]

Posted at 2017-01-13 by @gfwilliams

That's the first time I've heard of that happening! Is it a 32 bit Windows version, or 64 ?

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Posted at 2017-01-13 by jimgi

Hello Gordon - 64 bit W7.
It does look suspiciously like the application is being terminated...but as I mentioned, I have checked my anti-virus. Downloaded the latest version, and have an icon in my start menu. It all looks pretty normal.
I have run zadiq.

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Posted at 2017-01-13 by @gfwilliams

Maybe you could try running as administrator to see if that makes a difference?

Also, could you try going into Program Files/EspruinoWebIDE and renaming package.nw to something else, then running the executable in that folder? It should pop up a bare nw.js window... That'll test whether nw.js itself works properly at least.

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Posted at 2017-01-14 by jimgi

Hello again Gordon,
After about 3 hours browsing, I discovered that Chrome has a problem on W7 64-bit with USB 3.0 devices (or more specifically, the drivers)! This affects the Espruino native IDE.

I found this out because Chrome crashed when I tried to open the settings page. This seems to be a reasonably well documented issue. However, it is a driver issue and not a Chrome issue, according to Chrome. Can't imagine why this affects the native IDE though....

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/chrome/FdRgxB_S4EA/yj8RybRpDwAJ

I unplugged my USB 3.0 devices (USB 2 is fine) and the everything worked OK.
Apparently, this doesn't mean that you have to do without USB 3.0; there are updated drivers available somewhere, I haven't got that far yet.

At least now I should be able to use my new devices :-)

Hope this helps with anyone else out there who is still running on W7. I have a lot of stuff on W7 and as a result I am nervous to move to W10 - but I imagine I will have to bite the bullet sometime if the hassles continue.
Jimgi

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Posted at 2017-01-16 by @gfwilliams

Wow, thanks for letting us know - that's an amazingly strange issue!

The Native Web IDE uses NW.js, which is effectively just a packaged up version of Chrome. I guess it's not that surprising it suffers the same problems but I'm amazed that anything like that ever got shipped in the first place!