MEL-M and COM ports

[El Phantazmo]

Folks,

An old yet reliable 440LX MEL-M sporting a celery 333A and 256MB RAM
(Western 20GB 100/7200 Dlink 10/100 NIC, and a Guillmot TNT2 vc), factory
direct BIOS revision (not the latest)

Whilst installing Win2000 Pro, I noticed, after all was said and done, that
both COM ports had driver problems ... COM ports? Well, didn't think much
of it, considering how often I use a DB9 serial connection. Then came my
new PIC writer. Well, it just happened to be a serial box (ha!). Now I
need my serial ports. The original OS was Win982E, and, I did,
unfortunately, have to use a serial mouse when my optical went south, and
all I had was the serial mouse, so they did work.

Anyone know of any issues with this chipset/bios/Windows2000/serial ports?

tia

Elp.

 

[El Phantazmo]

Hi Paul,

Yeah, thought of that. Still no dice. Resources were showing no conflicts,
and I just set the Com ports to their default addressing (even set com2 to
an obscure address on IRQ 10) ... I did, however, locate an old lava 2 port
DB9 PCI card. Installed it, disabled the onboard and off it went ... odd,
very odd.

Thanks for your help Paul,

Elp.

 

[Egil Solberg]

Hi Paul,

Found some vague references aswell re: the BIOS/Mel-M/Com port issues. I
have had a less-than-enjoyable experience when flashing the BIOS of the
another MEL-M board. Luckily I had access to another BIOS from a MEL-M that
had some other problems.

Your advice re: BIOS flashing is sound. When asked if a BIOS should be
flashed, I typically respond "only if its broke".

I instaled WinXP on a MEL-M, don´t think I had any errors in device manager,
but then again, I might have disabled the COMports in BIOS, as usual.
Had flashed to latest BIOS to allow for a new harddrive. I think this will
fix it.