Vista cannot find a suitable driver for a "Generic Serial" port

[Juan I. Cahis]

Dear friends:

Vista cannot find a suitable driver for a "Generic Serial" port to be
installed.

I miss the ability to suggest a driver from the drivers repository
that WinXP has. In Vista, only the alternative to search for a driver
online is presented to you.

It seems to me that a "Generic Serial" port should not be a very
strange device to be installed for any operating system, how can I
solve this problem?

Is there a driver repository in the Vista DVD, like the old CAB files
of the I386 subfolders from WinXP, that I could copy to my hard drive
for future installations?


Thanks
Juan I. Cahis
Santiago de Chile (South America)
Note: Please forgive me for my bad English, I am trying to improve it!

 

[Michael Walraven]

Juan,

Not sure of your problem. My VISTA (home premium) installs a serial port
just fine. It works fine with an XP legacy device connected to that port so
seems to have everything associated with COM devices.

If I try to 'update' the driver, following the instructions leads me to a
list of compatible devices (two in my case) and allows me to select
non-compatible devices if I want, (which doesn't seems like a good idea). It
would also allow me to update from a 'have disk' option.
(start orb - right click computer - click properties - click device
manager - select Ports Com and Lpt)

Michael

Dear friends:

Vista cannot find a suitable driver for a "Generic Serial" port to be
installed.

I miss the ability to suggest a driver from the drivers repository
that WinXP has. In Vista, only the alternative to search for a driver
online is presented to you.

It seems to me that a "Generic Serial" port should not be a very
strange device to be installed for any operating system, how can I
solve this problem?

Is there a driver repository in the Vista DVD, like the old CAB files
of the I386 subfolders from WinXP, that I could copy to my hard drive
for future installations?


Thanks
Juan I. Cahis
Santiago de Chile (South America)
Note: Please forgive me for my bad English, I am trying to improve it!

 

[Richard Urban]

It is called a communication port (ex. = Com1). It is up to the device
manufacturer to provide software that works within Vista. I have a UPS
connected to Com1. Vista doesn't see it.

Serial ports are dead technology and I don't ever expect that my UPS will be
able to communicate with Vista.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)



Dear friends:

Vista cannot find a suitable driver for a "Generic Serial" port to be
installed.

I miss the ability to suggest a driver from the drivers repository
that WinXP has. In Vista, only the alternative to search for a driver
online is presented to you.

It seems to me that a "Generic Serial" port should not be a very
strange device to be installed for any operating system, how can I
solve this problem?

Is there a driver repository in the Vista DVD, like the old CAB files
of the I386 subfolders from WinXP, that I could copy to my hard drive
for future installations?


Thanks
Juan I. Cahis
Santiago de Chile (South America)
Note: Please forgive me for my bad English, I am trying to improve it!

 

[Michael Walraven]

VISTA has built in support for UPS devices but NOT serial ones!, found out
the hard way when I needed to replace mine. Was good sale on (Best Buy) for
one with serial but included a USB/Serial interface cable. That did create a
'serial' port but VISTA would not use it for a UPS. (I had sort of thought
the cable was going to something that looked like a USB port on the computer
end and a serial port on the UPS end, but it actually created what looked
like a serial port on the computer end). Anyway BB took it back without
question. (I needed a serial port for my vista for a legacy home-control
device,) required an extra internal cable as the DELL I bought didn't have
one standard. The old software for the device ran happy as a clam, doesn't
seem to notice that it is Vista rather than XP.

Michael

 

[DanS]

Serial ports are dead technology and I don't ever expect that my UPS
will be able to communicate with Vista.

Serial ports are not a dead technology altogether. For the home/small
office PC I'd say yes.

But they are still alive and well in various telecom markets, for
configuring devices, and tons of wireless serial based applications all
over the world.

 

[Stephan Rose]

It is called a communication port (ex. = Com1). It is up to the device
manufacturer to provide software that works within Vista. I have a UPS
connected to Com1. Vista doesn't see it.

Serial ports are dead technology and I don't ever expect that my UPS will be
able to communicate with Vista.

Actually Serial Ports are very much alive. It's exceedingly annoying to
have a PC without a Serial Port if you do software development for
embedded hardware. Especially when working with smaller processors that are
not powerful enough for Ethernet/USB or where having anything beyond a
serial port would just add too much cost to a device.

There are many applications where a serial port is beyond sufficient where
trying to use Ethernet or USB would be like swatting a fly with a nuke!
Not to mention the simplicity of a serial port VS Ethernet or USB. USB
especially is a pain to deal with.

Takes a single instruction to send a byte over Serial.

Takes by magnitudes more code to do the same via either ethernet or usb,
not to mention transmission overhead. They are also unsuitable actually
for certain types of communications where you only need to transmit a
single byte of information and need an immediate response in real-time
without packet overhead that is by magnitudes larger than the actual data.

On one of my projects, I had a USB Bootloader. 4kb available. 95% used for
USB Code, 3% used for the actual bootloader code.

Serial bootloader would have fit in less than 256 bytes.

Especially USB, from a developers perspective, I don't think I have ever
used anything more horrible. Great idea, absolutely horrible
implementation.

None of this may matter much from a PC's perspective with a 2.4 Dual Core
CPU and 2 gigs of RAM, but it matters significantly from a hardware
device's perspective with a few MHz and memory in the kilobyte range. And
guess what? That's what the PC is communicating with isn't it?

--
Stephan
2003 Yamaha R6

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[DanS]

Actually Serial Ports are very much alive. It's exceedingly annoying
to have a PC without a Serial Port if you do software development for
embedded hardware. Especially when working with smaller processors
that are not powerful enough for Ethernet/USB or where having anything
beyond a serial port would just add too much cost to a device.

It sure can be a costly addition, although you'd be suprised that
sometimes an embedded module w/eth may only cost $5-$10 more than the
same model, except w/o eth.

There are many applications where a serial port is beyond sufficient
where trying to use Ethernet or USB would be like swatting a fly with
a nuke! Not to mention the simplicity of a serial port VS Ethernet or
USB. USB especially is a pain to deal with.

Takes a single instruction to send a byte over Serial.

Takes by magnitudes more code to do the same via either ethernet or
usb, not to mention transmission overhead. They are also unsuitable
actually for certain types of communications where you only need to
transmit a single byte of information and need an immediate response
in real-time without packet overhead that is by magnitudes larger than
the actual data.

I concur. Many of the (serial-based) wireless systems we have sold are
doing very fast time-slotted polling, in the range of 100ms per
poll/response. There is no way to get that performance via ethernet. We
also have remote I/O gear that transfers I's at one end to O's at the
other (and visa-versa), and the response time of that is under 25ms from
the edge transition at one end to the output at the other end being set.

Oh yeah, the complete compiled code for the entire I/O functionality is
< 60K in size. And that includes a menu based UI as well.

The poject I am just starting uses ethernet, and just initializing the
CPU module with TCP/IP, doing absolutely nothing else except making it
appear as an active IP on the network, the compiled code is 130K. This is
before any functionality at all, to do anything, is added.