I just picked up a laptop to upgrade somewhat. I went from an old Dell pentiumII 233 with Win98 to an IBM pentium4 with WinXP. It does have a serial port. When i try to communicate using TC, it never connected at all. I went with a pcmcia to rs232 serial card, changed to that port in TC and tried reading again. It actually starts communicating, but errors part of the way through with an invalid message sent. I know its a laptop setup issue cause when i hook up my old Dell, it works fine. Is there some things i need to change since i'm trying to use TC with XP? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Ken R.

 

Mine has 3 different ports. I tried them until one worked. I will have trouble getting it started and switch the port between them and it will eventually work. It keeps coming up with errors and i have to exit and try several times & it will work sooner or later.

 

Hey Ken, XP is the only OS that I run and it has been plug-n-play on both of my laptops for me. I use the USB to OBDI/OBDII cable from AKM so I can't help you except to say that it definately is not XP doing it. I have tried using USB-RS232 adapters in the past for other projects and found them to be very buggy. I would being willing to bet that the PCMCIA-RS232 adapters are the same way.
Chas

 

Your probably right. I did mess with the FIFO a bit last night and got tunercat to read, but then it errors at the very end and won't reset the PCM. Don't think i'll try programming. Also got Freescan to run, but it's flakey. Think i may be bagging it and going with a USB setup if i decide to use this laptop in the future.

Ken R.

 

I had problems with 2-3 USB serial adapters on two laptops - one being a 233mhz the other being a two core IBM. Some software just will not work right with USB to serial adapters.

I have 0 problems with my PCMCIA serial on the same two laptops. The card is a cheap no name ebay special.

 

Thats the type of card i have dookie. Could you tell me what windows software your running and let me know what your com port settings are in the device manager? I'd appreciate it.

Ken R.

 

let's see if I can remember this correctly...

XP SP2 all updates + tons of misc software on it - no apparent problems
Red Chief PCMCIA card 16C95X / 0X16CF950
Serial Port settings: com port 2, rs232, bps=9600, data bits = 8, parity = none, stop bits 1, flow control none, fifo interrupt trigger - transmit 4, receiver 100, receive fifo flow thresh flow on 16, flow off 112. driver 4.0.9.0 dated 7-22-04 file version 3.0.9.001
LM1 Logworks software, default settings
Datamaster v3.51 default settings
LT1_Edit v2.2/PCM Programmer v4.9
Gtech Pro Software works also

That's all I can recall right now. Hope it helps!
BTW I used the newer versions of Datamaster with the USB Serial options even the recommended serial adapter, it worked better but still not perfect.