[UK-CONTEST] CW Keying from XP

[Bruce Sawyer]

>Has anyone experienced any problems with sending CW from Windows XP? I am
aware that XP
>doesn't support keying from the parallel port unless additional software
such as Userport
>is installed so the intention is to use serial port keying. I have seen a
suggestion that
>timing might be a problem. Please put comments to the Reflector as I am
aware that some
>other subscribers would be interested to know.

WinXP has been an absolute nightmare for me on this and related issues ever
since I "upgraded" from WinME to WinXP a couple of months ago.  I finally
came to the following conclusions:
(a)  For DOS mode CT and TR, WinXP is simply unusable.  I finally got a copy
of PartitionMagic, carved up my HD into multiple partitions, and installed
Windows98 just so I could run CT and TR.  Even at that, I found I had to go
into the msdos.sys file under Windows98 and set it so that the system would
boot in DOS mode, rather than windows mode.  (This is all described in a
page I found somewhere hanging off the CT web page.)
(b)  The Windows version of CT seems to run fine under WinXP, provided you
like using that version of CT.  This one kind of surprised me, since N6TR
had assured me that it was "impossible" to generate decent CW under WinXP.
(c) For Writelog, I did try DirectIO and could never get it to work.  I
contacted K5DJ about this, and he sent me the following:
"I have seen others say they couldn't get Direct-io to work.
 What I would get is get UserPort it's a shareware program. Also
 works like a swiss watch."
Ron was right.  I got UserPort (
http://www.embeddedtronics.com/design&ideas.html) and it works like a charm.
Even better...it was free.  So now I do have Writelog working fine with
WinXP, using LPT1 for keying.

For other logging programs, I have no idea.  I think each one is going to be
a minor battle in its own right, and the solution for each logging program
is likely to be different.  I have DX4WIN, for example, and still haven't
figured out how to get it to send CW over LPT1 under WinXP.  That's not been
a big issue for me, though, because I think the CW output from DX4WIN is
fairly awful even under earlier, non-NT windows systems.

Bruce, N6NT/ZF2NT