Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Purchasing

• Question: Do you sell floating licenses? Answer: No. The floating license versions of GeneLinker required too much time to support both for MMC and by system administrators. Instead we have dramatically reduced the price to allow customers to purchase what they really need more easily. We also provide significant discounts for site licenses, even for small numbers of users.
• Question: Do these prices include taxes? Answer: No. Canadian residents are charged GST and Ontario residents are charged both GST and PST.
• Question: Do you offer an academic discount? Answer: No. We want to treat everyone equally and we have made our regular prices far below most of our competitors prices (even with their academic discounts).

Products

• Question: What chip formats do you support? Answer: Support for all types of text files, 2 color data and a variety of native chip formats. Currently there are 20 supported formats including: Affymetrix 4.0 and 5.0, CodeLink, GenePix, Genomic Solutions, Quantarray and ScanArray.
• Question: How much memory does GeneLinker Require? Answer: GeneLinker's minimum memory requirements are 256MB of memory. This is sufficient to analyze the smaller Tutorial data sets. 512MB is recommended for most data sets (anything below 10 000 genes and 100 samples). For larger data sets (e.g. 30 000 genes and hundreds of samples), 1-2GB of memory improves the performance significantly.
• Question: What Operating Systems does GeneLinker run on? Answer: Microsoft Windows(R) 2000, XP, NT 4.0 Service Pack 6a, 95, 98, or ME. Windows 2000 and XP are recommended as they are more stable and manage memory more effectively.
• Question: What Databases can GeneLinker use? Answer: By default the GeneLinker installation will install and configure a MySQL data repository. IBM's DB2 and Oracle 9i (which must be purchased separately) are also supported and configuration applications for both of these databases are included in the install.
• Question: What is a gene list? Answer: Gene lists are list of genes that can be imported or created by users. They allow you to highlight or analyze only your favorite genes, and help support pathways, functional classifications and ontologies.

Support

• Question: After I perform a PCA experiment the application hangs or my machine crashes. How do I fix it? Answer: This problem only occurs if you have an out of date video driver. The 3D Score Plots are done using Java3D (which use hardware acceleration). If you upgrade your video driver, any problems caused by the 3D Score Plot (which is opened automatically after a PCA experiment) should be resolved. Please contact support if you need assistance upgrading your video driver.