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A storm's range isn't exactly right all the time.

Lightning/2000™ figures out the range of a storm with different statistical techniques.  Just as pollsters must use a large sample to accurately predict an election result, Lightning/2000™ performs better when there are a lot of strokes in a particular storm.  Storms with low stroke rates are difficult to range properly.

Also, the characteristics of a single storm change over time, resulting in slightly different ranging for that storm.

It's not perfect, and we're constantly striving to improve it, but Lightning/2000™ represents the state of the art in single-antenna lightning detection for personal use.

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The hard drive seems to start churning for a few seconds every few minutes.

L2K allocates many small bits of memory -- especially when a lot of lightning activity is going on.  When the memory isn't needed any more, it is de-allocated.  The problem is when a lot of these small bits of memory are repeatedly allocated and de-allocated, it can lead to a situation where Windows sometimes isn't able to find a bit of memory that is large enough for its own needs.  This situation is called "memory fragmentation".

We have noticed that on our Pentium machine with 96 MB of memory, this situation was reached after it had been running for a little over a week and about 1,000,000 strokes had been processed.  Every few minutes the hard disk would exhibit unusual activity for several seconds.  We think that this activity represents Windows' reorganization of memory.  This situation will take a longer time to happen on a computer with more than 96 MB of memory, and probably less time on a system with less memory.

There are a couple of things that can be done about this.  You could just shut down L2K and then restart it.  Another possible solution that we've just learned about is to use a third-party memory management tool that can perform the necessary memory rearrangement.  A good one can be found at www.memturbo.com  

Version 2.7 and later of L2K incorporates some important improvements to its memory management.  It was found that a moderately large block of memory was being repeatedly allocated and then de-allocated.  By avoiding this allocation/de-allocation cycle, the memory fragmentation problem should occur after a much longer time than before.

Version 4 incorporates substantial improvements in memory management. 

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The real-time lightning window's map looks "scrunched".

A recently discovered "feature" of Windows can cause the map in the real-time lightning window to look scrunched.  This can occur if you're using a BMP or JPG image as your background map that is larger than can fit on the screen.  The only solution to this problem is to edit the background map image so that it fits entirely on the screen.

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Last modified: Thursday, August 02, 2007