COM Port problems

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I have a WACOM graphics tablet which I have connected to the serial port of my DELL Dimension XPS T500. This box was originally bought with Win98 which I later upgraded to Win2K/NTFS.

I needed to increase the number of serial ports that I could use for other hardware, and so bought a Belkin USB Serial adapter FSU103 hoping that I could then use one of the USB ports as a virtual serial port.

This is when my problems started. The tablet stopped working completely, and no matter what I have tried since it will just not work any more. I uninstalled the Belkin drivers, and Win2K still would not let me use the tablet, so I uninstalled all the drivers for the tablet, and tried a reinstall. It now would not even recognise that there was a serial port on the box, and so I could not reinstall the tablet drivers.

I contacted WACOM support who suggested that I go into the BIOS, and make sure that the Serial port was enabled, which it was. They could not offer any other ideas. Belkin admitted that they were unable to recommend this use for their adapter.

Basically I am stuck.

Firstly I wondered how you can create more serial ports in Win2K. When I go into Settings|Control_Panel|System|Hardware|Device_Manager|Ports it only shows COM Port 1.

How do I create additional ports?

Does anyone else have any ideas?

Thanks in hope …..

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Have you got the latest tablet driver? I believe it is dated 11/12/01. I use the Graphire2 (USB) with Win2K SP2 on 2 Dell laptops without any problems, yet. Maybe you can find a converter cable to go from serial to USB or convert some of your other devices to USB to take the burden off of the serial port. Good Luck.

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First thing I did was make sure that I was using the most uptodate. WACOM support in Germany also asked the very same question!

This tablet is A3 size with only serial port. My experience with Belkin has now left me a little wary of convertors, understandably.
I think that some key file has become corrupted, but short of a complete OS reinstall, which I will not be doing, I don’t know how to track it down

Thanks anyway for your response.

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