A7N8X serial (COM) ports not working

[vmajor]

Hi,

I have an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard with the 1.04 BIOS running WIndows XP Pro. I am trying to connect my Psion 5mx palmtop to synchronise the files.

I am unable to establish the data connection. There is some activity between the serial port and the Psion as when I initiate the synchronization, my Psion turns itself on. However the connection is never established.

When I try to synchronise on another machine using the ASUS A7V mobo and Windows XP Pro, the procedure works perfectly.

Therefore there is something definitively wrong with either my A7N8X mobo or my Win XP Pro installation.

Can anyone help me?

Victor

[Strawbs]

are the ports enabled in the BIOS(Advanced\Integrated Peripherals)? is the board shorting out against the backing plate? would be my 2 q's.

[vmajor]

Hi,

the ports are enables in BIOS. How can I tell if the board is shorting? Everything else seems to work.

[meese]

When you look in the BIOS at the com ports, is it set to automatic? The problem may be that you Psion device needs to use the basic com port addresses and IRQ's. COM1 is usually address 3F8 and IRQ4, COM2 is 2F8 and IRQ3, if the PSION is an older device it may need to use one of these two options to work. The newer pc's today may assign different addresses and IRQ's to the com ports. You may need to go to the BIOS and choose the Address and IRQ to use for your com ports.

[vmajor]

Thanks for your reply.

Both ports are set to the basic (standard) settings, not automatic.
I am now trying to see what the differences in post settings may be between the machien that works and my computer using SiSoft Sandra... I hope that Sandra is reliable...

[vmajor]

I did some diagnostics... it seems that the PsiWin (synchronisation software) does not want to bind to the COM ports on my computer.

I managed to force it to bind once by exporting the registry settigns from the computer that can synchronise and importing them into my computer. I performed the full backup of my Psion.... and I thought that I fixed the problem... but this worled only ONCE!

... now whenever I try the same trick again, I have no luck.

So, I know that my COM ports work and that there is a software conflict somewhere. I have no modems installed and no other device that I am aware of using any of the COM ports.

I do however have a 3g NEC e606 phone whose synchronisation software emulates COM ports via USB (very weird, but that is what it does - it installed a virtual COM layer) I think that this is what is killing my Psion synchronisation. However, I am unable to locate this supposed dll or .vxd or whatever...

... do you know of a generic 'seek and destroy' device driver approach that I can use to isolate the software that is abusing my COM ports?

Victor

[vmajor]

Update.

After doing many different tests and taking wide and varied approaches towards identifying what exactly is going on with my ports and fixing it (registry hacking, system driver renaming etc.) , I, having run out of plausible causes, shut down SETIatHome application that startu up automatically on boot and lo and behold, my serial ports sprang to life!

I think that SETIatHome has a memory leak problem that was disrupting the location that serial ports use for I/O.... bizzare, but all is well now.

Victor