HELP All ye Windows Gurus! (long)

Just got a new laptop at work and it came preconfigured with Win2k.
Only problem is that we need it to run a DOS program which has to directly access the COM ports and Win2k doesn't allow this.

The laptop is an HP nc8000 and it came with WinXP Pro install CDs (our IT guys are the ones who installed Win2k and they are useless so that avenue is definitely closed).
/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/mad.gif

I wiped the hard drive and installed a dual-boot setup with WinXP Pro and Win98 -- WinXP for day to day stuff and Win98 for running that particular DOS program (our last laptop was Win98 and it ran just fine).

Only problem now is that Win98 drivers are hard to come by and on top of that I've got a resource conflict between the video card (ATI) and the motherboard????
/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon8.gif

Any tips so far?
The device manager will not allow me to modify the resources for either one so now I'm at an impasse.
Under WinXP (and Win2k) everything is fine so I'm sure it can't be a genuine hardware problem -- there has to be some setting or driver that's misbehaving.

I've installed the drivers for this particular Intel chipset hoping that that would reconfigure some of the motherboard resources but no luck.
/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif

Anyone?
/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif

Thanks much

I think windows xp has this feature that allows you to "simulate" how you wish to execute the program...does it not? Maybe that would work? You could run the program under XP, simulating it as windows 98

What you do, is find the .exe, or dos file, or whatever, right click on it, select properties
Window will open up, and there will be 4 tabs, one of which is called "compatibility"
Check mark the box that says "run this program in compatibility mode for:"
and then you can select win98....

I dunno if this will work...it works for some of my games though. Let us know the outcome!
If it works, im guessing you can wipe 98 now too /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif (old schooool)

How often do you use the DOS program ?

If not that often you could simply make a DOS based boot CD and run the program directly from the CD

Second the boot-disk idea. Since the NT days, all hardware calls in Windows have to be made to the HAL rather than directly to the peripheral.

With Windows NT and newer, you could only control the signalling protocol (flow control), data length and speed of a serial port.

You were on the right track with trying to use Win98, but the resource problem that you are seeing may be related to newer hardware if the notebook is a current model.

Have you tried running your app in Win98 safe mode?

try software called Direct I/O (uses giveio.sys driver) or UserPort.

shareware:
http://www.direct-io.com/Direct-IO/directio.exe

freeware:
http://www.mattjustice.com/parport/userport.zip

both are free and give direct hardware access under NT systems. you just specify a DMA range.

"The basics of usage are:

1. Copy UserPort.sys to %windir%\system32\drivers
2. Run UserPort.exe to set the port range you wish to open for usermode applications

It is that simple! The only drawback is that you are opening a security hole on your system that could be exploited by malicious programs. Therefore, only open the I/O port range that you need access to. Check the resources that your parallel port is using to determine the needed range on your system. UserPort also provides additional security by having the option to only allow applications that open the \\.\UserPort file to have access to the ports. This is a nice option but it requires some extra code. See the UserPort documentation for details.


been using it for a long time to get direct access to serial and parallel ports.

Leon

Tried both of the direct I/O programs without success.
The freeware one completely locked up my DOS program and the other one just didn't work.

I ended up going with a dual-boot of Windows XP and plain old DOS6.22.
Much less wasted hard drive space compared to a non-functioning Win98 install.
Installing DOS with no floppy drive was quite a trick though.

Thanks all.