New PC, many woes!

OK, had N8VBvCom, VVP, VPLive, VWS, Startwatch all working wonderfully on a Vista pc with an onboard serial port for 14 months. New Vista PC with no serial port, so using a Keyspan USB Serial Adapter. Installed everything, moved settings, etc., no problem. BSOD with something about Keyspan driver. Stop using VVP, VPLive. Set VWS to COM3, the real port, use vwsaprs.exe for CWOP sending. Worked fine for a week. I thought I’d try VVP again, ran it, set VWS back to COM6, left vwsaprs.exe for CWOP. So only VWS connecting via VVP. BSOD after 5 minutes. Now I’m back to no VVP, VWS connecting to COM3, vwsaprs sending. All’s well.

Does VVP not work well with USB serial adapters? Or do I need to try another brand? Or do I need to get a PCI slot serial card? Do I need to switch the Vantage Pro 2 back to a USB setup (and deal with IT’s drivers)? Or…??? It doesn’t seem to be the Keyspan USB adapter as it works fine by itself. It seems trying to use VVP is where the trouble starts.
Nothing in log.txt in VVP dir. I’m not saavy enough to find anything in the memory.dmp file with windbg or in the event viewer, but if anyone can tell me exactly where to look, I’d try to figure out exactly what causes the BSOD.

I assume Vista has a Com Port list in Control Panel - System - Hardware - Device Manager - Ports?

Check what things are prescribed on each Com Port. (Those are XP paths to the Ports, sorry if its different).

Vista has a COM port thingy the same as XP. I’ve checked it, matched baud rates, but changed nothing else. This COM port works wonderfully by itself with VWS only connecting to the station thru it. I guess I have a hard time believing it’s the COM port if THAT works, but if there’s any other settings in there that I should check/change, I’d be glad to give it a whirl. I did NOT have to do any of that on the other Vista PC I had this working on. Difference is that one had an on-the-motherboard serial port, and this one does NOT. So it’s likely the USB serial port, or something with VVP connecting to the USB serial port.

I have another USB serial adapter, a Dynex. I might give that a whirl and see if that fixes it. Or purchase a PCI slot serial card and see if that one acts more like the onboard one.

There’s nothing I can think of in VirtualVP that does anything even close to dodgey that might cause a BSOD, and I can’t recall anyone having that experience. I would strongly suspect a driver issue, and just because one program can access a driver without a BSOD but another program can’t does not necessarily shift the suspicion away from the driver. It may just be that different programs exercise different parts of the driver’s code.

I think the first thing I would try is to completey uninstall the adapter drivers and the N8VBvCOM driver. Next, I would just install the adapter driver. Then I would have VirtualVP connect to the console through that adapter. To get some activity going, you could have VPLive connect to VirtualVP via TCP/IP. See if you get the BSOD. If you do, then I might try another adapter at that point. Adapters that are based on the Prolific chipset seem good. If you don’t get the BSOD with just VVP and VPLive, then I would install the N8VBvCOM driver and get VWS connecting like you want. See if the BSOD reappears. It might not. Just the act of uninstalling and reinstalling drivers sometimes clears these things up.

Let me know how it goes.

OK, thanks. I’ll try this stuff and see what I can figure out. I have to figure out how to connect VPLive via tcp/ip, I’ve never done that, but it can’t be too hard, the rest of your stuff is pretty easy to understand!!

How would I know if an adapter has a Prolific chipset? I searched around and can’t find the info. I looked in the properties of this Keyspan in Device Manager, but can’t see that info anywhere. Do you know of any brand names that use this chipset?

Edit…nevermind! I just ordered one on your order page after reading the next post down!! Doh!

I still wouldn’t mind knowing how to tell which chipset these things have!!!

If you google

prolific chipset rs232

you’ll find some, as there are pretty many out there. Many people consider it to be a solid chipset, and it’s also popular because it works well with linux too. I have an inexpensive prolific based adapter for sale on my site:
http://shop.softwx.com/USB-to-RS232-Adapter_p_2-13.html

If your adapter has the prolific chipset, XP and Vista will likely just recognize it and download/install drivers automatically when you first plug it in, without even needing any proprietary drivers that came with it. But just looking at the box, it may be hard to tell unless they specifically say so. Sometimes manufacturers may even use one chipset for a while and then switch to a different one for a while. Once installed, you should see the word “Prolific” as part of the driver name in the device manager.

All that said, Keyspan adapters have a good reputation too from what I can tell. Hopefully just reinstalling the drivers will sort things out. Before you do that, you might want to go to their website and see if they have updated drivers you can use instead of what came with it.

Steve
SoftWx

I just learned what you say about chipsets is true! I had two other USB adapters here. Both were shaped the same, looked identical. Plugging one in got me a Prolific driver, plugging the other in got an FTDI driver. Both, however, installed in Vista without any additional drivers from a disk. I’ll take the Prolific to the weather computer and uninstall N8VBvCOM, the Keyspan driver, and plug this Prolific chipset adapter in and try again. This way I’ll never learn about the Keyspan driver/N8VBvCOM/VVP interaction and if it could have been fixed with uninstall/reinstall, but if it works with the Prolific adapter, that’s all I want!

I removed the Keyspan drivers and N8VBvCOM. Added a Prolific chipset USB Serial Adapter I found in my collection. It installed by itself. I reinstalled N8VBvCOM and rebooted the computer just to be safe. I started VVP and set it up. I ran VPLive setup for COM7. Started VWS and changed the COM port back to COM6. All has been running for 11 hours+. I think I have it fixed! Must have been some kind of issue with the Keyspan driver. I never did try uninstalling/reinstalling the Keyspan driver, so I’ll never know if I might have gotten that to work.

Thanks for the help, Steve.