[RTTY] 4-port serial card for Windows 8.1 results

[Don Hill AA5AU]

Thanks to everyone who sent information on the serial cards they were using in their Windows 8 computers. I purchased a new Dell
3847 desktop PC with Windows 8.1 and it arrived this past Monday.

On the serial card, I decided to go with a suggestion from Joe, W4TV, on the Syba model SD-PEX15011 for three reasons. One is that
Joe is usually good about suggesting hardware (I purchased two USB sound cards he recommended and they work great), secondly because
this particular 4-port board is the sister of the 4-port board I have been using in my XP Pro machine for many years, and thirdly
because of the price. It is cheaper than any of the others. Although the manufacturer is listed as Syba, it says "Best Connectivity"
on the box.

I purchased the SD-PEX15011 from Newegg on Monday and it arrived today.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124075

I installed the board this evening using the instructions that came with the board. I'm sorry to report that nothing worked as it
was suppose to but in the end, for reasons I can't explain, all four ports magically started working.

The instructions said to install the board, turn on the computer and Windows would recognize it - it did not. Windows did not like
the board being installed and kept giving an error that it had to shut down and restart because "page fault in non-paged area".

I decided to remove the board and install the driver on the disk that came with the board, then re-install the board. There were
Windows 8 drivers on the disk. Windows still did not like the board being installed. On occasion it would give me the "page fault"
error and restart, but I did notice that COM 1 was showing up and the other ports were also showing in Device Manager but Windows
didn't know what they were. I tried re-installing the driver but it wasn't working. I went online to find updated drivers. The
drivers on the Syba website were actually older than the ones on the disk and I didn't see any for Windows 8. I did find a set of
instructions for Windows 7 that suggested to "Disable Driver Signature Enforcement". I finally found instructions on how to do this
in Windows 8.1 because the instructions for "Disable Driver Signature Enforcement" on Windows 8 are totally different. I am finding
out that Windows 8.1 is different than Window 8 in many ways.

Rebooting after "Disable Driver Signature Enforcement" helped keep the PC from wanting to restart. I re-installed the drivers as
Administrator but the ports did not show up in Device Manager. So I switched over to my non-Administrator account for no good reason
other than to check the Device Manager; lo and behold, all four ports showed up in Device Manager.

I went ahead and tested all four ports and they all work for radio control and FSK/PTT. I restarted the computer several times and
have not gotten the "page fault in non-paged area" error and everything seems very stable.

I don't know if I would recommend this board to anyone other than to someone who has time to play with it to get it to work. I think
it's going to be OK, but if you want to spend a little more money, maybe something like a StarTech would install better. I don't
know.

I will give it the smoke test in SPDX RTTY this weekend. I'm just not a fan of USB-to-serial adapters for FSK. Especially with the
BARTG 75 coming up on Sunday. Definitely need a legacy COM port for 75 baud on a homebrew transistor FSK interface!

73, Don AA5AU