We take pride in giving our customers excellent technical support: no queues, no hassles – just a friendly, knowledgeable person on the line. We realize that the best products are developed with the customer’s input, so we’re good listeners. From general information or help installing software upgrades, to technical support on any of our products, we look forward to helping you solve your thin-film characterization and surface science needs.

k-Space engineers are available to assist you, free of charge, during normal business hours (Eastern time zone).
Please feel welcome to contact us with your support questions.

On this page are some common support questions and solutions.

• Upgrade operating system?
• Sentinel Key not Present (XP/2000)
• Sentinel Key not Present (Win98)
• Exporting to *.tiff or *.png
• Slow or No Acquisition after Service Pack 2

Upgrade
operating system?

Products Affected
kSA 400
kSA MOS
kSA MOS Ultra-Scan
kSA RateRat Pro
kSA BandiT

Solution
Please contact our technical support staff if you are planning to upgrade your computer operating system. Specific data and system parameters need to be properly saved before any operating system changes are made to ensure that your kSA system will continue to function correctly. Please be advised that you could lose important system information if the correct data is not saved.

Sentinel Key
not Present
(XP/2000)

Products Affected
kSA 400
kSA MOS
kSA RateRat Pro
kSA BandiT

Solution
If you are getting a "Sentinel Key Not Present" error message and have recently upgraded your computer operating system to Windows XP or 2000 and are still using an older parrallel port dongle you may need an updated sentinel key driver. Please download and install SSD5411-32bit.exe from our ftp site.

Sentinel Key
not Present
(Win98)

Products Affected
kSA 400
kSA MOS
kSA RateRat Pro
kSA BandiT

Solution
If you are running a kSA application under Windows '98, and you intermittently get a "Sentinel Key Not Present" error message while running the application (that shuts the application down), then the sentinel driver was not properly loaded during the installation of the product. Please download the following zip file from our ftp site: sentinel driver.zip. Once you have downloaded the file, unzip it to a directory called "Sentinel" on your local hard drive, making sure that the subfolder paths are maintained when unzipping, i.e. there should be several subfolders created with files in them. Then, run the Setup.exe program from the Sentinel folder and step through the installation to properly install the sentinel key driver.

Exporting to
*.tiff or *.png

Products Affected
kSA 400
kSA MOS
kSA RateRat Pro
kSA BandiT

Solution
If you are experiencing problems exporting *.tiff or *.png image and chart files, download tiff_png_export.zip found on our ftp site. Once you have downloaded the file, unzip it to the following directory:
C:\Program files\kSA\_____\Program
where _____ is the kSA product.

Slow or No Acquisition after Service Pack 2

Products Affected
kSA 400
kSA MOS

Solution
If you are experiencing slow or no acquisition after upgrading to WindowsXP Service Pack 2, the solution is usually solved by installing a new driver for the PXR framegrabber. Please follow the steps below and if you have any problems, please contact us and we would be happy to step through the process with you

1. Download the latest driver for the PXR 800. Run this file, which is self-extracting, and place all the extracted files in a new folder on your hard drive.


2. Uninstall the current PXR driver by going to Manage/Device Manager/Update/Uninstall.


3. Delete the PXR driver by going to Control Panel/Add/Remove programs, and remove the PXR 800.


4. Turn off and restart the computer.


5. When WindowsXP finds the PXR 800, point it to the new folder you just created containing the new driver files.