Thinking of Moving from HS3 to HS4

[langenet]

kenm I had this question which I wanted to clear up. Did you just install HS4 and not uninstall HS3? That is you have both installed in your programs?

Thanks

Robert

[kenm]

kenm I had this question which I wanted to clear up. Did you just install HS4 and not uninstall HS3? That is you have both installed in your programs?

Thanks

Robert

Correct. That way I could run either if I wanted to as long as I didn't run them both at the same time. Once I was finally comfortable with HS4, I created a .ZIP backup of the 'HomeSeer HS3' folder and simply deleted it. I never uninstalled HS3.

Edit: The .ZIP backup was just for archival purposes in case I needed to reference something down the road.

[langenet]

Thanks again for clearing that up. With this I may just give the upgrade a try in the not so distant future. If it goes south, I can revert back to HS3.

[joegrace13]

My HS4 is not stable at all. HS3 ran for months without issues. The PC had to reboot to install security updates to take down HS3. HS4 crashes every few days with nothing in the logs or in the Windows event logs. Nothing. 'Homeseer was not properly shut down last time..." Ya, thanks Columbo.

Logged in today after noticing it was down. The watchdog was crashed. Ironic.

[kenm]

joegrace13 How old is your Windows PC? Laptop? Desktop? Is the whole PC restarting or is it just HomeSeer that's dead?

The reason I ask is this was a problem I was having about 3 years ago and it turned out to be a bad memory DIMM. I took it offline for a couple of days and ran MemTest86 before it finally identified the bad DIMM. During that time, I moved HomeSeer to a laptop and it ran perfectly, so I ended up just leaving it on that laptop.

[joegrace13]

joegrace13 How old is your Windows PC? Laptop? Desktop? Is the whole PC restarting or is it just HomeSeer that's dead?

The reason I ask is this was a problem I was having about 3 years ago and it turned out to be a bad memory DIMM. I took it offline for a couple of days and ran MemTest86 before it finally identified the bad DIMM. During that time, I moved HomeSeer to a laptop and it ran perfectly, so I ended up just leaving it on that laptop.

It's a little over a year old. It's the same system I've been running HS3 without any issues. It's definitely not the OS or the system hardware.

[Techvet]

I'm kicking this older thread versus starting a new one. As many of the veterans in the HS community know, the native UI of HS4 leaves a lot to be desired. When HS4 was first released, I opted in for the "early bird" HS4 upgrade pricing and figured I'll roll it out one day. That day arrive in Oct of this year after I'd cleaned up my UPB set-up with new PCS hardware all around. Rather than do the well documented simple HS3-HS4 swap published here in the forums, I opted to build from scratch. The UPB import went very well, but the Z-Wave import of my thermostats hit a snag and try as I may I never could get one of my thermostats to import in off the Z-Stick. No one offered advice on the problem and never was that much of a Z-wave fan to begin with, so I decided it was sign from above that I needed to upgrade out of Z-Wave, so I went with Ecobee. That transition was very smooth, as was my Caddx integration. However...

I was really flummoxed by the HS4 UI. I decided that the list view was what I preferred despite it being a huge waste of screen space. But my biggest gripe is that for some reason the sort of device names is really messed up. For example, in HS3, Zones 1-30 of my alarm system sort sequential numbers of 1-30. In HS4, it's 1, 11, 12,13, 14, 15, 2, 25, 26, 27, 28, 3, 30,4,5,6,7. No amount of renaming would fix this. The same was true for alphabetic names. I really wish we had sort options could be drilled down to sort on Lable 1 first, then Label 2, then Label 3. I still don't understand why that is not available in the 4th iteration of the software. I tried Jon00's excellent Link Editor to get my legacy screens back and that works great, with the benefit the old legacy screens actually sort as expected. However, in the end it was a little clunky to have to pull that view up every time the system started, and to do anything serious behind the scenes I felt the need to work off the native HS4 screens.

So, I decided to stay with HS3 for now. It works fine and covers everything I need. I did have to buy the HS3 Ecobee plug-in to integrate my new stats, but that was that easy, thank you Spud! That man is a master!! I have things preserved in my HS4 set-up so I can easily return to it if/when the UI gets sorted. But for me HS4 is still not sorted enough for me to invest any more time in it right now.

[kenm]

Techvet - I have the same problem with irrigation zones. While, in general, this isn't a solution, I ended up making my own webpage using jon00 's webpage builder for these devices. It uses a text .INI file to define the devices and page layout. Note that this doesn't resolve the same issue with the device list when trying to select a device for an event.

https://forums.homeseer.com/forum/3r...r-3-homeseer-4

[brientim]

You can reorder zones (the features) in the core UI very easily. Go to the Root/Parent Device > Features and you can move any feature up or down to display in whatever sequence you require. This sets the Features Priority Order attribute and will display the same order.

[langenet]

I'm still on HS3 as well. I'm just putting this upgrade off. My system along with the 21 plugins I have work flawless. I realize that someday I'll have to do it, but to be honest, I'm scared to upgrade to my purchased HS4 upgrade.
I only restart my system once a month and that is for Win2k16 updates. I feel confident in that I can travel and my system will just work without issues. Should a powerfail exceed the life of the UPS, it will come up without any manual intervention as HS, Phoscon run as a service. I'm wondering what the reliability metrics are for HS4? It's important for me that HS4 performs as reliable.

[kenm]

You can reorder zones (the features) in the core UI very easily. Go to the Root/Parent Device > Features and you can move any feature up or down to display in whatever sequence you require. This sets the Features Priority Order attribute and will display the same order.

In my case, it's the root device sort order that was the problem. Each irrigation zone has a root device with two features, status and control. The sort order is 1, 1x, 2, 2x, 3, 3x, etc.

[John245]

I'm still on HS3 as well. I'm just putting this upgrade off. My system along with the 21 plugins I have work flawless. I realize that someday I'll have to do it, but to be honest, I'm scared to upgrade to my purchased HS4 upgrade.
I only restart my system once a month and that is for Win2k16 updates. I feel confident in that I can travel and my system will just work without issues. Should a powerfail exceed the life of the UPS, it will come up without any manual intervention as HS, Phoscon run as a service. I'm wondering what the reliability metrics are for HS4? It's important for me that HS4 performs as reliable.

Running under Ubuntu 20.04 LTS latest and reliability is 100%.

---
John

[Techvet]

Techvet - I have the same problem with irrigation zones. While, in general, this isn't a solution, I ended up making my own webpage using jon00 's webpage builder for these devices. It uses a text .INI file to define the devices and page layout. Note that this doesn't resolve the same issue with the device list when trying to select a device for an event.

https://forums.homeseer.com/forum/3r...r-3-homeseer-4

I figured there were many work arounds, but that's more work than I want to put into it now. I spent a few hours just building up the UPB, Thermostat, and Alarm stuff. I actually started over twice because I wanted everything just right and I wanted to learn the ins and outs of HS4. As a result, I'm pretty comfortable building a system from scratch. And, as I stated earlier, Jon00's work is awesome. It's just a shame that you have to in essence hack a program to get it with the functionality it should have come with right out of the box.

Reordering the child devices would solve my problem, but the Caddx Alarm plug-in isn't written for parent child devices. Again, Jon00 has an excellent solution for that, but in my mind it's a solution to fix a broken feature of HS4.

The bottom line is that I've gotten quite comfortable with HS3 and it works reliably. I'm definitely not missing anything in terms of what I'm looking from the system. I'll continue to watch fine tuning of HS4 and I'll probably come back to it someday - or wait for HS5??

For the HS team... I'll offer a friendly suggestion that you take a look at Quicken software. They have made continual improvements to the user interface, but every new version of their software had the ability to select the "Classic" interface, that keeps all of the functionality of the new one while letting experienced users have the comfort of what they know and that doesn't require them to develop new muscle memory.

[TC1]

For the HS team... I'll offer a friendly suggestion that you take a look at Quicken software. They have made continual improvements to the user interface, but every new version of their software had the ability to select the "Classic" interface, that keeps all of the functionality of the new one while letting experienced users have the comfort of what they know and that doesn't require them to develop new muscle memory.

What you are presenting is an apples to oranges comparison. Quicken is a larger company and larger team (long time user here) compared to HST. In order to maintain two different interfaces, one needs an extra set of resources. The economics of doing this simply doesn't make sense for HST.

And being resource limited, HST had the foresight to make HS4 extensible, in both the interface and plugins. There are various substitute front-ends that folks have written.

[Techvet]

What you are presenting is an apples to oranges comparison. Quicken is a larger company and larger team (long time user here) compared to HST. In order to maintain two different interfaces, one needs an extra set of resources. The economics of doing this simply doesn't make sense for HST.

And being resource limited, HST had the foresight to make HS4 extensible, in both the interface and plugins. There are various substitute front-ends that folks have written.

You're probably right about the resources bit. I guess since they made the new software backward compatible with the HS3 plug-ins I would have thought they could have done the same with the interface. Like I said, I'll probably revisit it one day to give it another go - when I have more time.