It is always another little problem. But, on occasion, a problem is an excuse to have a little fun while getting the job done.
Enter an old WYKO interferometer with a composite video output. The gear is a critical piece of kit used to monitor the deformable mirror used in the adaptive optics system. The images from the interferometer are analyzed by a windows PC with special software. Windows, as in Windows 98!
Updating this computer has been on our to-do list for way too long. Time to get it done… When installing the new computer and video board to update this system I found that the video quality was quite bad. It would tear about halfway down the image, something wrong with the horizontal sync? Looking back it was not great on the old system, but usable. On the new system it was just not going to work.