to all the owners of mares icon hd, or those who thought about buying it,i got Qs plz

[MeanGuy]

buddhasummer, well to be honest , i charged it fully last week , it was on 90% when we reached the diving site, dove with it for 1 hour and 38 minutes, total of 3 dives in shallow depth, on my way back home, it was like 73%

now its been a week since my last dive, the battery is 30% , they do say that we need few cycles before the battery gives out its best performance.

im sure old owners would give a better feedback about the battery life. so far its not bothering me. cant dive this weekend because of bad weather -.-

 

[Hatul]

Until I get this to connect to the Dive Organizer without error messages I can't recommend it. It's just not worth the hassle. I'll try phoning Mares tech no support again next week and if no response will return this and go with a Sol.

Adam

 

[MeanGuy]

im sorry that you're having problems with the computer, i heard it has a problem with the drivers on 64 bits windows 7 computers , i checked my laptop, its 32-bits. so maybe thats the problem. i did install the organizer first and let it install the drivers and all. then connected the computer.
all i can say is good luck

 

[Hatul]

im sorry that you're having problems with the computer, i heard it has a problem with the drivers on 64 bits windows 7 computers , i checked my laptop, its 32-bits. so maybe thats the problem. i did install the organizer first and let it install the drivers and all. then connected the computer.
all i can say is good luck

I installed the software on two computers: one an XP and other Vista, both 32 bit. It installs fine. The problem is, every time I connect the Icon the software thinks I'm connecting a new dive computer and asks for the new computer name. If I enter the same name it complains that the new computer is using a duplicate name, if I enter something else in the name field it gives another complicated error message that only the programmer can decode. If I click to close the New Computer window, it tell me to disconnect the the computer.

It seems one other user on the Mares forum has hit the same problem. The software has no useful Help file; when you click on Help it just tells you to go to Mares.com. I submitted a tech email to Mares.com many days ago and never heard from them. When I called Mares in the US by phone the guy had no clue, and told me to take it to the dealer to send it in to Mares. It's a brand new computer that costs $1.5K so if I send it back to Scubatoys it will be for refund and good riddance. I don't need a dive computer that requires luck.

Adam

 

[MeanGuy]

hey adam, i fully agree with you to be honest. however , if you check
Windows End of Support Information - Windows Help & How-to
you'll find out that microsoft has stopped supporting both windows xp on July 13, 2010. and vista on july 2011

im a computer tech, you can never imagine how annoying it was whenever you had to format and install the drivers when we used to forget to take backups, or when the client is like "i dont know where my driver cd is" we used to extract them from the system "if we were lucky and the system was running" ... or spent hours and hours looking through the net for drivers and installed them one by one and see which one fully worked.

but windows 7 and vista have almost the same drivers , and if you're pc is running vista, i highly recommend 100% to use , its faster and cleaner. my laptop came with vista basic and i had to removed it to install 7 as soon as i got it out from the box. trust me

if "however" you still wanna keep your windows vista , check out this post by this guy

Mares ICON HD problems installing??

just remove everything and start from scratch. do u have netframe 3.5 installed as well? download it and install it manually. we always used to download the requirement one by one on vista and xp.

i can't find a driver for it on windows xp though to be honest. so i guess it doesnt have one on xp.

not like i support the ****ty mares software support , who am i talking about "blekh, italians!" they have one of the worst attitude in the world (i am not talking about all italians! only some of the people i've met) .

but i know how excited you were when you bought it, just like me, and having it not working, is like a slap to your face.

so the best solution is to get windows 7 installed on your computer =) "usually if u put windows 7 on vista's computer, u can just upgrade it to windows 7 without needing to format it and losing your work"

although i do recommend a fresh install , or if you want ,you can have just 2 operating systems and try out windows 7 for couple of days if you're not sure whether its good or not.

remember, microsoft has stopped supporting both systems, it means you will never get updates to make things work anymore. xp was pretty stable that im sure of (i used to use windows xp and linux) up until win 7 came out, now im just using 7 .

vista on the other hand, is a mess.

thats all the help i can give you adam =)
if you need anything, just ask

 

[Hatul]

if "however" you still wanna keep your windows vista , check out this post by this guy

Mares ICON HD problems installing??

just remove everything and start from scratch. do u have netframe 3.5 installed as well? download it and install it manually. we always used to download the requirement one by one on vista and xp.

i can't find a driver for it on windows xp though to be honest. so i guess it doesnt have one on xp.

not like i support the ****ty mares software support , who am i talking about "blekh, italians!" they have one of the worst attitude in the world (i am not talking about all italians! only some of the people i've met) .

but i know how excited you were when you bought it, just like me, and having it not working, is like a slap to your face.

so the best solution is to get windows 7 installed on your computer =) "usually if u put windows 7 on vista's computer, u can just upgrade it to windows 7 without needing to format it and losing your work"



vista on the other hand, is a mess.

thats all the help i can give you adam =)
if you need anything, just ask

The drivers are not the issue here. Windows installed the Icon driver and the Icon computer connects. In fact I was able to upgrade the firmware of my Icon to the latest 3.04, so I know the OS connection is ok. The problem appears to be something in the way the Dive Organizer sees my Icon. For some reason it does not recognize it as as the same computer that was connected before.

There is a data file called DiveOrganizer.sdf that contains your login inf and other data like the dive computer info. If I delete that file the Dive Organizer gets reset, and then if I connect the Icon it accepts it as a new computer. It will upload the data from the Icon so I know the connection is fine and I don't think it's a Windows problem. The problem comes when I disconnect the Icon and reconnect. That's when the problems start. The Dive Organizer does not recognize it as the same computer as before but pops up a New Computer window.

Remember the link you gave me was to someone who connected with a Vista computer, so I don't think it's an OS system issue. What I can't understand is why some have hit this problem and some have not.

In any case other problems may come up in the future, so if I can't get any satisfactory response from Mares support it's a good test case and I have only about 10 days to decide if to keep it.

Adam

 

[MeanGuy]

i see, im sorry then, i can't help you with that.
if i were you, i would return it.
but then again, some people dont even use dive organizers so its totally up to them.

best of luck .

 

[BKP]

For those of you with Win 7 64-bit... I run *only* that version on multiple systems. However, being a tech, I have to support multiple environments (both Servers, as well as PCs). Assuming you have 4Gb or better RAM (to support your 64-bit install), you can download VMware Player (for free), and run a 32-bit OS (or more) within a VM (virtual machine). Your software will most probably run then...

Microsoft has a similar free single-system hypervisor: MS Virtual PC (with XP mode -- it's free).
Enjoy...

 

[MeanGuy]

thanks for the reply bkp , none of us is using win 7 64 bit =) but thanks for the contribution , his problem is with the organizer, i checked the change log of it a few days ago, there was a hotfix that said they fixed a problem that some of the computers not being able to connect to the organizer .. so its mare's software , not the windows ..

hopefully he'll find a solution soon.

 

[TechDeep]

thanks for the reply bkp , none of us is using win 7 64 bit =) but thanks for the contribution , his problem is with the organizer, i checked the change log of it a few days ago, there was a hotfix that said they fixed a problem that some of the computers not being able to connect to the organizer .. so its mare's software , not the windows ..

hopefully he'll find a solution soon.

Actually I am using Windows 7 64 bit, and I got the software to load and run just fine on my system as it is, no VM ( although I dio have a server running 2008 server, with several VMs) I didn't have to go that route.

I think Hatul's issue turned out to be a defect in the software of his Icon HD.