Poor COM port performance from DOS program

[James & Darla Martin]

Hello there,

We have a MS-DOS based application that communicates with another device
through a COM port. It doesn't require any special drivers since the
communication is straight COM port data transfer. This program has worked
flawlessly on Windows 95, 98, and 98SE. But its performance under XP is very
poor. Occasionally it will work perfectly. But most of the time it either
communicates very slowly or it garbles the communications.

I've tried all the things I could think of (verifying the port settings
match, running in Windows 95 compatibility mode, etc.), to no avail. Also,
I've probably installed this on 80 or 90 PC's with Win95 or Win98 over the
years with no problems, but all of these problems show up on every XP
system.

Since it's an app that every PC in our office must run, we don't have the
option of dedicating a Win98 machine to it. We really need to get it running
under XP.

I understand that XP doesn't handle MS-DOS apps in the same was as previous
versions of Windows. But I'm hoping it is still possible to get it doing a
simple COM port communication.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

James

P.S. On the unspeakably remote chance that someone has ever heard of this,
the actual app name is RTE2 and I'm using it to communicate with Rexon
computers.

 

[Malke]

Hello there,

We have a MS-DOS based application that communicates with another
device through a COM port. It doesn't require any special drivers
since the communication is straight COM port data transfer. This
program has worked flawlessly on Windows 95, 98, and 98SE. But its
performance under XP is very poor. Occasionally it will work
perfectly. But most of the time it either communicates very slowly or
it garbles the communications.

I've tried all the things I could think of (verifying the port
settings match, running in Windows 95 compatibility mode, etc.), to no
avail. Also, I've probably installed this on 80 or 90 PC's with Win95
or Win98 over the years with no problems, but all of these problems
show up on every XP system.

Since it's an app that every PC in our office must run, we don't have
the option of dedicating a Win98 machine to it. We really need to get
it running under XP.

I understand that XP doesn't handle MS-DOS apps in the same was as
previous versions of Windows. But I'm hoping it is still possible to
get it doing a simple COM port communication.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

James

P.S. On the unspeakably remote chance that someone has ever heard of
this, the actual app name is RTE2 and I'm using it to communicate with
Rexon computers.

Hi, James. Thanks for the very complete post and for including the app's
name. And no, you didn't get lucky with me knowing the app. ;-) I also
think you are not going to get lucky with getting this app to work well
with XP. It isn't just that XP doesn't handle DOS apps the same way as
Win9x; it is that NT-kernel-based operating systems have no true DOS at
all. There is only a DOS emulator in XP. Lots of old DOS programs
needed to interact directly with the hardware - and it certainly sounds
like your RTE2 does - and that is absolutely forbidden in XP. It's one
of the reasons XP is so much more stable than the older Win9x's. Maybe
you will get unspeakably lucky and someone reading this newsgroup will
know about Rexon computers. However, my sympathetic advice is 1)
contact whatever tech support you can find - for RTE2 and/or Rexon; 2)
find a different app that will do what you want; 3) even though you
don't want to do this, keep boxen around running Win98SE.

Cheers and good luck,

Malke