WIN500 needs to be rewritten, Its VERY slow to read and write to. And has not had any updates for quite a long time.
Tnx 73
I've never ever seen a read/write speed problem with Win500.
In fact, I've always considered it very fast compared to other models from various manufacturers.
If anything, it could be some error checking routine or possibly something sharing the I/O bus with the serial adapter or serial interface you may be using to talk to your radio with Win500. Or some other type of conflict with Win500 and something running on your computer.
Or, malware running on your machine. Some people also run multiple AV or anti malware apps. Those type apps can fight one another and can slow down an otherwise fast machine to a crawl.
Uniden models can read or write just the blocks of memory that have changed which can be an advantage as you don't need to read or write every memory cell in the radio. Even though Uniden's method can be a speed advantage, Win500 and a PSR600 was always way faster during ram reads and writes.
GRE models on the other hand do read or write the Entire contents of its ram chip. There's no partial reading or writing like how Uniden does it.
None of that applies to the SD card based models from either manufacturer. This post is discussing pure read and writes to/from the radios ram chip via a serial interface such as is used on the non SD card models like the PSR500 or 600.
If your computer no longer has a true hardware serial port, then a usb to serial adapter would be used or an add-in serial port card. The USB to Serial devices are very popular today but there can be conflicts on the USB bus. The usb to serial adapters are also not always created equal. The older ones revealed some very poor performers back in the day. I've probably used or tried them all over their development.
I've used Win XP through Win 10 for talking with my PSR600 using Win500. If anything, various versions of Win 10 were the slowest when it comes to the OS but Win 10 was still not 'that' slow,
If you were not aware, the install folder for Win500 should have two executable files for the main program. One will be named Win500.exe and the other is Win500_COM.exe. I've always seen better speeds and less conflicts with the WIN500_COM version as it does not contain any automatic com port routines. You must manually select your com port for this version. In many cases, the _COM version has been WAY faster than the non com version when I'd ran tests or worked on comm problems.
Try that if you were not aware of it. I don't think Don had both version in the earliest release versions of Win500 but both were in the later or most current versions of Win500. He did this because people were having problems getting the auto com port detection working like it should.
There's a good chance the _COM version will take care of your speed problems. If not, there must be something else going on with your system or hardware as Win500's communication speed with the radio is anything but slow.
It's not even close to slow! My PSR600 only has a couple free blocks of ram free. Win500 reads or writes the entire contents of my PSR600 in about 5 seconds or so.
It really does not matter if your radio has its ram mostly empty or near full like mine as the GRE design reads and writes the Entire ram space anyway, regardless if it's used ram or not.
As a comparison, I have Uniden 996T and XT models that have about 25% of their ram used. Uniden's design allows for programs to read or write just the part of ram that is actually used. This speeds up reading and writing so you don't need to access the unused space when programming. Even with this feature, my x96T and XT models take about three minutes to write my programming into the radio(s). Reading is slightly faster but not by a lot.
Check for that WIN500_COM version and run it instead and see if that fixes your speed problem. Hopefully it will.
Also, when you run the WIN500_COM version, look under the Configuration/Serial Port menu item. There will be three different check box options there with an explanation for each check box. Play with those settings. One or two of them can definitely change your overall communications speed between Win500 and your radio.
