COM & LPT ports

  • Thread starter Thread starter BH
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BH

I recently had my computer upgraded to WinXP home and had
a new network card installed as well. Now my printer and
zip drive (both parallel port) will not work. I installed
all of the necessary drivers to be compatible with XP.
The only thing that I can trace it to is in my port
section I now have a COM1 and COM2 ports where I used to
have a COM1 port and a LPT1 port. I have not been able to
source out a way to change that second COM port back to a
LPT port. Does anyone have a suggestion? Thanks in
advance.
BH
 
You can't change a COM port to a LPT port (or vice versa)
as they are different hardware althogether - one is a
serial port and the other is a parallel port. Most
computers have LPT1, COM1 AND COM2 hardware installed -
some notebook computers don't have COM2 as this is used by
the InfraRed port. (Some don't even have COM1 now)
I would suggest that your computer has managed to
correctly find a COM2 port which should ALWAYS have been
there.
The network card may be interfering with the LPT1 port so
I would remove the network card, then go to control panel
and look for new hardware and see if it finds the LPT1
port (which it should). Once you have the LPT1 port back
then shutdown the computer and add the network card back
in again.
If it can't find the LPT1 port then you may have it
disabled in your computer's BIOS in which case it's not
working because it's turned off.
 
BH said:
I recently had my computer upgraded to WinXP home and had
a new network card installed as well. Now my printer and
zip drive (both parallel port) will not work. I installed
all of the necessary drivers to be compatible with XP.
The only thing that I can trace it to is in my port
section I now have a COM1 and COM2 ports where I used to
have a COM1 port and a LPT1 port. I have not been able to
source out a way to change that second COM port back to a
LPT port. Does anyone have a suggestion? Thanks in
advance.
BH
Click to expand...

In addition to glyn's answer, do not try to chain the printer and the
zip drive. XP will not support this mode.

Q
 
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