Topfield 5800/Getting Help

Getting Help

If the information in the Troubleshooting section doesn't help you, the Toppy has active and helpful user forums. For the UK models (5800, 5800t and 5810 and others), the best place to get help will be the UK user forums at forum.toppy.org.uk.

Using the forums effectively

Please bear in mind that the helpful people on the forums read and post in their spare time - they're not paid to do it! Before you post your question, please search the forum to see whether your question has already been answered. (The forum does have its own search facility, but you may find it more effective to use Google, including "site:forum.toppy.org.uk" in your search.)

If you still can't find an answer to your question, the following tips will help others to help you.

Post in the appropriate forum discussion area.
Be specific, and include as much information as possible related to your question.
Include information about your Toppy and setup: The answer to your question may depend on exactly what you're running. Please don't say you're running "the latest" firmware, because you'll just get a reply to say that various versions of firmware could be considered "the latest", so it's an unhelpful statement to say the least - and anyway, latest is very definitely not necessarily best in this instance. See below for how to find and report what you're ACTUALLY running.

If people trying to help you make the wrong assumptions, the advice you receive may be just plain wrong, and could result in you doing things to your Toppy that may be potentially frustrating and time-consuming to recover from. In other cases, something you hadn't thought of as being relevant may be precisely the thing that somebody else recognises as crucial to your issue. Either way, the more basic information you make available on the forum, the more effectively and quickly people will be able to help you.

Save time and get more targeted help with a signature

The most effective way to include the basic information about your setup (and save you forgetting something or endlessly repeating yourself) is to set up a signature. To do this, click on the Profile link at the top of the forum page and scroll about halfway down where you'll see the signature box. Type or paste in here information about your Toppy. As a rule, you should include at least the following information:

Your Toppy model (e.g. 5800, 5800t, 5810, etc.)
Your firmware version and patches

(To find your firmware version, press Menu and then choose Information, System Info and report the Software version, or see MyInfo below for an easy way to find this out plus more detail on which patches are installed - NB: Most of the toppy.org.uk site's recommended firmware include a number of pre-installed patches)

TAPs - if any - run from Autostart and their version numbers
PC/Toppy connection setup if "unusual". A number of Windows XP/Vista tools are available to connect to and use with a Toppy. The general assumption will tend to be that you run Windows. Clearly, although the majority still do, an increasing number of people don't. If your sig tells people your only PC runs *nix, 64-bit Windows or something else, people can point you to the appropriate alternatives instead.

See below for information on the MyInfo TAP which can generate an accurate signature for you by scanning your Toppy for information.

Just below the signature box, in the Preferences section, change the setting for “Always attach my signature” to Yes, or nobody will see your signature and all your efforts will have been wasted.

MyInfo – making it even easier

The easiest way to get most of the useful information about your Toppy for your signature is to install and run EMJB's excellent MyInfo TAP. This can either be run interactively to show the information on the screen, or can run silently and automatically on startup. In both cases it will generate a text log file which you can copy back to your PC. (You will not be able to see or read the log file using the Toppy user interface.) Included in this log file is a suggested signature to use on the forums which includes all the information above. Simply select this section of the log and paste it into the signature box in your Profile. You don't necessarily need to understand all the information in the signature for it to be useful to people trying to help you!

To install MyInfo, download the zip file from the link in the first post of the MyInfo forum thread.

Extract all the files from the zip, and use Altair (or whatever you normally use to connect your PC to the Toppy) to copy MyInfo.tap from your PC over to /ProgramFiles/Auto Start on the Toppy. Once you have done this, each time you reboot (i.e. start up the Toppy), MyInfo will wait for a minute to allow other TAPs to start. Then it will run, create a log file, and exit without showing anything on the screen. You can also run MyInfo interactively. If you run it more than two minutes after your Toppy has started up, it will display information about your Toppy on the screen as well as creating the log.

The log file created (MyInfo Log.txt) will be stored in ProgramFiles/Logs, and you can copy that back to your PC also using Altair or your normal connection method. The suggested signature is at the end of the log, and you can add other useful information to your signature too (within the limit on the total number of characters in a signature, of course).

Any time you change something on your Toppy (e.g. installing new TAPs, updating firmware, etc.), don't forget to run MyInfo, copy the new log file back to your PC and update your forum signature.

For more details about MyInfo, read the PDF file included in the zip file. If you have any questions about the MyInfo TAP or suggestions for features, please post them in the MyInfo thread on the forum.