Surface Pro 3 with microSD card hangsSolved

Hello,

We have been running into issues lately (4 individual customers) with Surface Pro 3 computers running Windows 10. Additionally, they have microSD cards connected to their machines which are seen as drives by Windows. The issue seems to be correlated with the microSD cards. The license check is hanging on these machines when the drives are connected.

Three temporary workarounds have been found so far:1. Remove the card when they want to run the software2. Select the drive and then launch our software3. Using a trial license => trial licenses do not encounter this problem

We are using the latest version of TurboActivate.

Is there anything we can do to address this issue?

We can't reproduce this. Even using old very slow SD cards everything works correctly (and fast).

Just to double check, were you testing with a Windows 10 Surface Pro 3?

A few of the customers were able to use our software before when they had Windows 8 without any issues and then after they upgraded to Windows 10 they started to have the problem.

Yes, it was.

We were able to reproduce this, it's caused by the power manager "putting to sleep" cards and disks that haven't been used in a while. This includes plugged in SD cards.

We'll look into possible fixes, but as far as we see this is a "feature" of Windows. We'll see if there's a way to workaround this "feature". But we're concentrating our energy on getting 4.0 out first.

Thank you for investigating that.

Do you think that this will be an issue in 4.0?

Well, yes. Because TurboActivate needs to read harddrive information (among other hardware information). If the SD card is "asleep" it has to be woken up. We've looked into workarounds but there's nothing to do short of telling Windows not to put SD cards and harddrives to sleep.

Paying customer here.

This bug just bit me in the ass while I was in front of my own customers. I spent a couple hours tracking a hang in "my" software, down to Turboactivate hanging indefinitely during a TA_IsActivated() check. The customer kept asking me "have you broken my machine" every ten minutes until I was able to isolate the problem to TA attempting to connect to the network and hanging, and removed the SD/MMC card, and suddenly my software magically worked.

It is NEVER acceptable, under ANY circumstances, for the TA_* calls to hang indefinitely. If the disks are in sleep or hibernation, and TA_* can't wake them up after a few seconds, it should ignore the disks for the purpose of calculating the unique machine's ID, or it should time out and report a meaningful error code. Hanging, under ANY type of PC hardware configuration, is a deal breaker for TurboActivate. Please fix this or report a reasonable workaround asap. Thank you very much.

Well add a timeout and a new error code for a bug fix release after 4.1.0. We cant fix buggy hardware, but we can tell you their hardware needs fixing faster.

Answer

We've fixed this issued (many and/or very slow and/or broken "storage devices") in TA / TF / TFS 4.4, out now.

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