Printer port card and Vista

[CbrViking]

Well, I got me a DynaCNC machine and Mach3, and the machine needs two parallel ports. I get one of the ones thay have on Ebay, the MP8875 single port PCI cards. Well, since all I had were notebook PCs, I had to buy a desktop to run Mach3, and all new PCs come with Vista instead of XP. When I installed the card, Vista reported that it was all fine and good, but when I checked with device manager for the port address, that reports that the card can't get resources and therefore didn't install right.

What I need are one of two things... a Vista driver for the card, or a source for a different card. Can anyone help out?

[HuFlungDung]

Windows can fool some of the pci cards some of the time, but if plug and play is not implemented perfectly (whatever that entails) on the card, then plug and play may not be able to get the interrupt that the device needs.

Solution: turn off (in BIOS) any real hardware com ports that are not needed, and anything else that takes an interrupt, but is not currently in use. It would be unlikely that all your real interrupts are taken, but it could be that there is a 'favoured interrupt' for parallel port cards. IRQ 7 comes to mind. Only one port can have this IRQ at a time. So you need another free IRQ.

Then, also try moving the added parallel port to a different PCI slot, as the interrupt assignments can be affected by which slot you use.

[ger21]

Or buy a copy of XP Home from Newegg for $89

[Switcher]

Or just start over.

http://cgi.ebay.com/HP-PAVILION-A610...QQcmdZViewItem


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[CbrViking]

Soution - I loaded XP using a license I have for another PC, and after an hour and a half of fighting with customer service people who barely speak English, I got install codes. I had to call back after being refered to the Microsoft Piracy Hotline. It should have been simple - transfer my Vista license to an XP license...

[NC Cams]

It is too bad that you can't run Mach on 98SE. Perhaps M$ doesn't care/or support that anymore and you don't have to kiss Bill Gates hind regions to load or be subservient to their DRM crap.

Not to beat a dead horse but would someone explain why simple machine control needs Vista or something beyond 98/98SE, especially when there were 2, 3 and 4 axis CNC sytems that ran on DOS??????

Please do not list websearching and/or gaming as a reason - I'm talking pure machine control not all the other multitasking stuff that is NOT endemic to true machine controlware. As far as networking, I don't see Mach as a commercial shop based system and, for that matter, you can download darn near anything to a CDROM anymore so I don't Ethernet as mandatory anymore to transfer data.

[ger21]

Not to beat a dead horse but would someone explain why simple machine control needs Vista or something beyond 98/98SE, especially when there were 2, 3 and 4 axis CNC sytems that ran on DOS??????

Because Mach uses a special "driver" that basically takes control of Windows. It was written for Windows 2000 and XP, because those were the the currently available operating systems at the time, and dealt with the hardware very differently than Win98. Can you give me any examples of someone developing new software that runs on an OS that is no longer supported and no longer available for purchase, and for which no device drivers were being developed any longer? If Mach was developed for Win98, no way would it be as popular and widely used as it is. It works on most Microsoft OS's for the past 7 years, and it still works on Vista.