After doing a fair amount of WEB searching, a few phone calls and some insight
from a couple of my long time hacker friends here on the WEB, here is what I
have been able to discern about freeing up some IRQ's and what a USB can do
for
you.
First my good buddy Jay WS7I pointed out ....
"Turn off the IRQ to LPT's Dave. Printer port's aren't bi-directional
so IRQ's aren't needed. Usually in BIOS setup you can disable the
IRQ."
I was able to turn of the IRQ on LPT2 which is on a card. The bios and Win98
wont let me turn off the IRQ on LPT1 which is on the mother board. I could
probably disable the mother board LPT and go to a card and then turn off the
IRQ for that one as well. At any rate freeing up IRQ 05 from LPT2 has at least
allowed me to install the sound card, my first goal. The 2nd radio and COM5
are
months away anyway.
Here is what I learned about USB, which while not cheap yet, for those of you
who want lots of COM ports here is what you need as near as I can tell.
1) You need a Pentium Mother board with a USB built in or a mother board
with a
free PCI slot.
2) You must be running WIN95 OEM release B or WIN98 (I suspect that if you
have
the earlier release of WIN 95 you can upgrade from the MS web site).
3) If you have no built in USB then you will need a USB PCI card, cost :
$60 -
$80
4) Next a you will need a Hub which basically expands your USB to additional
outputs. Most HUBs expand to 4 USB outputs, I saw one with 7. If you need more
than this you can daisy chain em as I see it . cost $99-$299 The 4 HUB jobs
are
all external and powered by the USB.
5) Assuming you are now hooking up "legacy" RS 232 objects (such as TNC's,
keyeing interfaces, radios, external modems etc) to your USB ports you will
need a USB to RS 232 adapter (one for each dedicated RS 232 device). The
adapters come with software drivers that assign the RS232 adaters to COM #'s
(see additional info below). You can also buy a direct USB attachable Mouse
and Keyboards. There are also USB to Centronixs printer adapters as well. Cost
of the adapters is about $79 each. I have also listed a few WEB sites that I
found were the most informative at the end. Hopefullly the prices will come
down in time.
The follwing was in response to my query to the folks at Eteklabs who were
most
helpful on how the USB handles the COM port assignment issue.
> Our installation program will pick the first free COM port it can
> find. If COM3 and 5 are unused and you install 2 Kwik232's, they will
> occupy COM3 and 5. We also have a property page which will allow you
> to 'map' a Windows COM port to a DOS com port. For example, if you
> have a Kwik232 installed at COM15 and you want to use it with a DOS
> application, you can set it to use the resources of COM2. In Windows,
> it's still COM15, but any (well behaved) DOS application can use the
> ports and IRQ's of COM2. I hope this answers your question. If not,
> please feel free to call us.
WEB sources that I found useful
<http://www.usbstuff.com/>http://<http://www.usbstuff.com/>www.usbstuff.com
<http://www.peracom.com/>http://www.peracom.com
<http://www.eteklabs.com/>http://www.eteklabs.com
Regards all
Dave
K9NX
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