Eviews7 crashes Vista Business 64 bit

[TheKid]

Hello,
I recently purchased Eviews7.
Over the last couple of days I've tried to use it for a total of about 1 hr on a PC running Vista Business 64 bit and 6GB of RAM.
The 3 times I have opened and tried to use Eviews7 on this machine I've experienced the following problems shortly thereafter
1)Bluescreen type crash warning that the system was stopped to prevent damage to my machine
2)Grind to a halt lack of responsiveness of operating system where the only solution is to switch power off and back on to reboot
3)Grind to a halt lack of responsiveness of operating system where the only solution is to switch power off and back on to reboot

So long as I don't launch Eviews 7 I can run all my other programs as normal on this machine

As a control, I've also installed Eviews7 on my Vista Business 32 bit laptop and that seems to work ok for now (45mins)

Is there a known issue with Eviews7 on Vista64?
Do I need to make specific setting changes to my Vista 64 setup to make this work?

Thanks so much for any help

TheKid

[EViews Gareth]

I've been using EViews 7 on Vista 64 for a couple of years, without anything like that happening. EViews should not (and I really can't think of any way that it could) cause operating system instability. If things go wrong with EViews, it is hard to see how they could affect the rest of Windows, especially causing a BSOD.

[TheKid]

mmm... interesting. Well it keeps crashing my Vista64 Desktop. I'm succesfully running many many other applications on this machine but every time I run eViews I get a system failure shortly therafter. Anyone else have any experience/solution for this?

[EViews Steve]

I as well have run EViews 7 on Vista Business 64-bit (in a VM) and it hasn't given me any problems.

I did read somewhere that 32-bit applications running under a 64-bit OS requires Windows to run the application in WOW64 mode. Perhaps your system is having problems specific to WOW64? If you were running other 32-bit applications just fine, that would negate this possibility.

Just thinking out loud...

Steve

[EViews Steve]

I thought of some other ideas and questions for you...

EViews7 introduced the ability to support multiple processors and/or cores. Go to Options->General Options->Advanced system options. Try changing the setting under "Multi-processor/Multi-core use" to 1.

Also, increase the amount of memory reserved for Windows to 1000 megabytes (under the "Memory allocation" section). and uncheck the "Compile to Intel machine code" checkbox (under "Expression/Equation evaluation" section). Then click OK.

Does your system become unstable after just launching EViews7 and then quitting immediately? Or do you have to use it for a while for the instability to show up?

When you do use it, are you loading extremely large workfiles? Or is your workload nominal (how many observations in your workfiles)? A general description of what you're actually doing in EViews7 could be helpful.

Steve

[TheKid]

Thanks Steve for trying to help with this.

Here are the answers to your questions
I do operate MS Office 2003 (32-bit) succesfully on this machine and use Simultaneous and Multiple very large Excel worksheets (100MB or more each)
Eviews7 doesn't make my system immediatelly crash when I open it. It does take using it for some 5-10 minutes or so for the problems to arise.
I've only tried working with Mickey Mouse sized Eviews files of less than 200 observations and only a handfull of series so far. The operations I've tried are are Series Statistics->Unit Root Tests, Estimate Equation (LS and Quantile) and Estimate VAR and had a look at residual corrolelograms and heteroskedascity tests.

I'll try your suggestions of setting to one core, increasing heap size and stop Intel machine code compiling and report back on what I find over the next few days as I've got some Eviews work coming up.


I have some questions for you though. When you say you run EViews on Vista 64 in a VM, do you have to do something specific to launch the VM or deas the OS know to do this automatically?

[EViews Steve]

I launch the VM manually whenever I need to test stuff on 64-bit.

[TheKid]

Ah interesting,

Which VM is it and how do you launch it?
Forgive my ignorance. I don't know anything about how Vista 64 bit runs 32 bit software

I'm starting my EViews work today so will be able to come back with the results of your suggestions shortly

[TheKid]

Ok tried all your suggestions and have managed to run Eviews succesfully for 2 days.
The strange thing is that now when I switch the options back to their original settings I'm not experiencing instability. At least not yet.
Thanks for your help on this.