We recently added the Forearm option for Prodigy to our Bone Density rooms. At the same time, we decided to upgrade to new PCs (our old BD PCs were Win95/NT, and served us fine to this point). Here are some thoughts and notes on migrating to a new Prodigy PC:

Purchase an extra scanner interface card (Sealevel). This allowed us to leave the old PC as is, in case we needed to swap back to it for any reason. The card is fairly inexpensive ($200CDN), and this leaves us with a spare to use for the next upgrade, or in case a replacement is ever needed.

On the new PC, it is neccesary to use the same Calibration file as the old system. This file can be found in the Lunar Config directory, and has a .CAL extension. Simply copy the most recent .CAL file to the Config folder of the new Prodigy PC. Then you must enter SERVICE MODE to point Prodigy to this file. This can be found under User Options, in the Systems tab. Click on SERVICE, and then enter the password. For us it happened to be MADISON, though I am unsure if our reseller sets this, or GE. From this menu, you can also run a test to ensure everything is communicating properly.

TIP: Be sure to plug the table into the proper port on the PC. This sounds obvious, but one day I accidentally plugged it into the regular serial port, and it took me an hour of fiddling to realize my simple mistake.

I find it wise at this point to do a QA test with Prodigy, to confirm that all is functioning properly.

Our previous Prodigy configuration was set to Archive data to another HD in the PC. I think this was done when the main HD got full, and the solution was deemed to simply add in a second HD and archive to it. The issue I have found is I am unable to move the database file to the new machine (lunar.mdb), and have it work properly with those archived studies. My course of action was to consolidate all the data from the DATA and ARCHIVE directories into one directory on the new PC, and rebuild a new database from scratch. This works fine, except now I lose any manually imported data (of which there is thankfully little). Luckily, since we have paper records of it, it can always be entered again if needed.

Now that the new PC is on the network, I set it to back up the Prodigy data directory (and any other needed directory) to a server automatically each night.

All that is left is ensuring all the user options are set the same. I use a program called SnagIt to allow me to rapidly do screen captures of the various preference screens. That way I have a permanent and easy to understand record of these settings.

Hope this helps even just one person out there. I came into my first migration with no knowledge of Prodigy software. While these steps above may sound simple if you are familiar with Prodigy, they took some time to figure out the first time. Please leave any comments or suggestions.

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