Serial boards with serial cards....Old skool

[Andycat]

Hi, we have a few serial boards still (ie 1st gen, no USB socket) and we've installed serial cards in the new PC's. The writing is very spiky, a circle becomes a hexagon etc. Any particular settings the serial port needs? Win 10 on pretty decent spec, can only assume it's the settings, baud rates etc..???

[win]

We've got a few on serial as well, havent' changed any of the default settings for the serial port. Perhaps you can try an older driver and also check if there is any electrical interference

[3s-gtech]

Same, our seem to work fine on defaults. Think the baud rate is 9600 but not 100% sure. I have seen this behaviour before and it was fixed with newer drivers many years ago.

[DangPro]

Hi AndyCat,

 

I would suggest going into the users temp folder (%temp% in file browser address line) and delete all the temp files. Reboot and give it another try. This should resolve your issue.

[Andycat]

Hi all, tried all the above suggestions but still no joy.

 

Anything with the pen is jagged:

 

Tried updating the serial card driver too (MCS9950MF\STN_CASCADE_COM) without much success.

 

Tried baud settings of 9600 and 38400 etc. We're on Win10 x64 so limited to Activdriver I can find too unless anyone has an old one knocking about?

[3s-gtech]

Got any way of testing it on a machine with an onboard serial port (I know these are getting rarer)?

[Andycat]

Got any way of testing it on a machine with an onboard serial port (I know these are getting rarer)?

 

Yes, they all worked fine with the PC's we took out at summer. (RM EcoQuiet with a serial off the motherboard header)

 

These new Dell Optiplex don't have a header so we're having to use Startech PCIe cards.

[3s-gtech]

Will the RMs run Windows 10, if you still have one to test? Might just be worth a shot to see whether it's the drivers and OS together doing it. I suspect it's the PCIe cards not producing a good signal for the OS to interpret, regardless of baud rate, but it could be a number of things. This will help to isolate the issue.

[Andycat]

Will the RMs run Windows 10, if you still have one to test? Might just be worth a shot to see whether it's the drivers and OS together doing it. I suspect it's the PCIe cards not producing a good signal for the OS to interpret, regardless of baud rate, but it could be a number of things. This will help to isolate the issue.

 

Same OS and image , just different PC's!

[3s-gtech]

Then it's a case of trying different serial cards or trying USB serial converters (which are usually junk tbf). How many PCs are you talking?

[Andycat]

Possibly 10. The 2nd gen ones that were historically serial, we've already run USB to. It's just these few 1st gen.

[peferraro]

What ActivDriver are you using? What is the firmware on the board, you can see that in the ActivManager/Control Panel?

Also, check your ActivInspire settings, here is a support article for you to follow.