Knowledgebase
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Red, Yellow slash through the utility in Spyder3 Utility
Posted by Larisa Bolli on 09 July 2009 08:57 AM
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Here is some information on Spyder3Utility: 1. Some text items in the Utility menu (access this by double-clicking the Utility icon in the Windows system tray; or clicking on it, in the OSX menu bar) are grayed out (disabled). These text items are status indicators that will change from time to time, based on the state of Utility, Elite, the sensor, ambient light levels, and the display recalibration reminder interval. They're "grayed" because they're not true menu "commands", and if they were not "grayed" (disabled), you would be able to select them, which isn't appropriate for text items that aren't actually commands that would "do" something. 2. The blue LED pulsing is a function of the hardware; there's a command that Utility gives to it to turn this on, or off. As long as it's plugged in and has at least some power, it'll keep pulsing. When it flickers (on the Utility heartbeat), that means Utility's giving it the command to measure ambient light. 3. No slash through the Utility icon means that it's running silently; sees and is communicating with the Spyder3; and is taking periodic ambient light measurements (approximately once a minute). 4. A yellow slash means that Utility is running, but disabled. The most common reason is that it can't find the Spyder3. If you have the sensor plugged in; and then unplug it, Utility will pick up on this sometime in the next minute, or less, and yellow-slash itself as an indication that the sensor isn't connected. If you plug it back in again, it will see the sensor again the next time it does it's "once a minute" check and it will either go back to unslashed (no warning condition) or red slashed (as described below). The other way of getting a yellow slash is if a) You uncheck the "Enabled" command in Utility's menu (i.e. you manually disable it, so that it's not doing any monitoring or communication, whether a sensor is plugged in, or not, or b) If you launch Elite; doing this disables Utility's access to the sensor, since they both can't use it at the same time. In this case, Utility will stay yellow-slashed until you quit from Elite, at which point, it will wake itself back up again within a minute or less after Elite is no longer running. 5. A red slash means that it's communicating with the Spyder3 but that there's a warning condition you should check. Currently, there are two different things that Utility monitors that would cause this: - You've exceeded the recalibration preference period in Elite. (I think the default for this is 2 weeks). You'll get an alert about this when Utility first launches, if this is the case (Utility is typically launched only when you reboot your system; you can manually quit from it, and relaunch it, as follows, if you like: use the Windows Task Manager to terminate the Spyder3Utility process; then relaunch it from its subfolder in the Spyder3Elite software folder on your system). - The ambient light level that it's monitoring has changed from the ambient light level that was recorded during your last display calibration. Whenever you calibrate a display, Elite saves the time of calibration and the ambient light level into a file that Utility checks. If your ambient light was "Moderately Low" when you calibrated the display, and if later on, you turn off all the lights in your room, Utility will pick up on this, and the red slash is a way of warning you, without continually popping up annoying reminder dialogs...:-) Just double-click on the Utility icon in the Windows system tray; it will tell you what the current ambient light level is, and what the ambient light level of the last calibration was (It will say "needs adjustment to" followed by that saved ambient light level). Is this truly important? Maybe, maybe not. If you're building your display profiles so that they're adjusted according to the ambient light level in the room (there's a control for doing this when you calibrate the monitor) | |
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