serial ports

[rubberman]

a puter runing XP pro and so how the serial ports quit working. its an older 850hz machine but they worked fine in the past. i used a serial mouse and a p/s2 serial adapter mouse to test and neither work on com1 or com2. is there another way to test the 2 ports out?

[guns1inger]

If you have an old dial-up modem, try installing that. You should be able to see the modem settings through windows in the comms (serial) ports work

[rubberman]

i thought about getting the serial to usb adapter

[JimboS]

2 questions...I think ..or maybe just thought's...
1..I'm surprised the Win XP Pro even works on a 850mhz computer...
2.. Why do you need the serial port's???

[gadgetguy]

Does Device Manager indicate any trouble or conflicts for the serial ports? Have they been disabled in the BIOS? The limited experience I have with USB/Serial adapters was less than desirable when connecting to a PBX, an external modem, and a monitoring device. If you can get the true serial ports working I would recommend sticking with them.

[redwudz]

I've ran XP on a 366Mhz computer. As long as you have enough memory and hard drive space it will work. A bit slow, though. W2000 is usually a better choice.

Have you checked in Device Manager? I would also see if it's a IRQ problem. AFAIK, the PS/2 ports are serial also, so it sounds like a hardware problem with the MB or the connectors.

A lot of newer computers don't have serial ports. But you should be able to use a Serial>USB port adapter. I have a GPS unit that needs a serial port for communication.

[rubberman]

yeah i even installed xp on a 266mhz maachine and it worked. no conflicts in device manager

[TBoneit]

XP runs fine on Pentium 3s with enough memory.

In my experience at work it seems that XP starts quicker on the same computer than Windows 2000. TEsted a Clean installl of both on the same computer as a test.

Did you run the hardware wizard after hooking up the serial mouse? Are you sure the mouse is good? Serial mouse is getting to be old tech.

Look in device manager under ports and see if the serial ports show up there.

[rubberman]

i found an old ISA serial card that i was gonna use on this computer. will i need drivers for it? i cant find this card anywhere on the net so it must be old.

[redwudz]

You most likely will need drivers for your ISA card. But they should be available somewhere out there. I've had good luck with sites like Driver Guide. http://www.driverguide.com/

If all else fails look for other numbers on the card. It may be too old for FCC ID numbers, but you can search with those. http://driverzone.com/guides/find/fcc/fcc_p1.html

And you might also get some numbers off the main processor chip and search on the manufacturers site for that.

I haven't seen ISA slots for a while, good luck with your project.

[TBoneit]

The other thing is that the ISA serial card may be the type where you set the port address and irq with dip switches or jumpers. IOWs Com1, Com2, Com3, Com4. 2f8, 2e8 and irq 3 or 4 etc. Being a ISA card it is quite likely to be entirely hardware and no software drivers needed beyond having windows detect it by running the hardware wizard as it is most likely not plun-n-play