Help! Smart Board SB580 END OF LIFE - NOT supported in VISTA / 7 / 10.6 / 10.7 / 10.8

[bcsdtech]

Hi All,

This past year we upgraded our schools to Windows 7 (yay!) and Smart Notebook 11 (mistake..)
We have a few hundred boards across the district (SB580 / SB680).

So far we've had numerous problems with the SB580s that use the SMART Serial -> USB Cable. The board will intermittently get disconnected mid class, some days it will not works at all. The little status indicator light switches from green to red with the message (no data being received on this port)

I had a support ticket in with Smart last month and they were suppose to get back to me. After not hearing from them, I called back last week and was told.

"As overNovember 2nd 2012 SMART will no longer support SB500 series boards on thefollowing Operating Systems: Mac OS 10.6 , “Snow Leopard,” Mac 10.7 “Lion” andlater / Windows Vista and later. In addition to this, older (supported)operating systems will work ‘as is’ with no future hardware/software upgrades.
If you haveany further questions or concerns, please contact us again."

The rep told me that since many users had reported this problem, they decided to end support for these smart boards. They won't even support 10.8 on windows 7....

Pretty amazing they can get away with this.. we upgraded our systems after checking that our boards would be compatible. Now, 2 months into the school year they won't help us with the problem.


Any recommendations very much appreciated.

Thanks

[BHMS]

I went through Smart support to get this fixed myself. The problem is Windows 7 does not assign the correct driver to the device. Find the Smartboard Cable in the device manager under USB devices. Update driver > Specify the location yourself. The driver you want is:

x64: Program Files (x86)\SMART Technologies\Education Software\Drivers\x64\STI2303X64.INF

x86: Program Files (x86)\SMART Technologies\Education Software\Drivers\x86\STI2303X.INF

[exim]

The rep told me that since many users had reported this problem, they decided to end support for these smart boards.

Fantastic customer service policy. Once you get lots of fault reports, decide the product is no longer supported.

[Windy12]

I had this problem on a few teachers laptops where they had 2 user accounts.
I removed one user account (which they didn't use anyway), so they just had the one admin user account, and they have been OK up to now, *touch wood*

[gshaw]

Ours generally work OK on Windows 7 x86 running the latest v11 drivers and software although one board does do the disconnect thing you mention above (think it's the board rather than the drivers though as it did it on XP as well)

[Michael]

To be fair to Smart the SB580 series (with a black surround) are pretty old and haven't been sold in years.

USB was never designed for long distance, but USB over Ethernet is a cost effective and reliable way around this.

Smart Notebook 10.8 is pretty reliable and stable on newer and older boards. Smart Notebook 11 needs a lot more work, so I'll be waiting for a later build to be published.

[SchTechGuy]

We use the genee powerboard and we have no problems on any of the windows family operating systems or the macs we have in our design studio. Infact I think these are the only boards we have ever had that support all major operating systems.