hello, My problem is In our organisation they have designed one hardware circuit which will work with parallel port of the cpu, to communicate with the software. But it is not working only with win2000 Operating system. It will work with win millenium and win98. I checked it by connecting three different PCs which have win2000. It won't work. What could be the problem ? Is win2000's parallel port is not compatible with any other circuits ? Please inform me the solution. It's Urgent.

Pat: Parallel ports work fine under Windows 2000. I suggest you go into the BIOS settings on the Windows 2000 systems. First make sure the parallel port is not disabled on the Windows 2000 systems. Then through trial and error work your way through the three different parallel port modes, ECP, EPP and something else. This may get you going. Also, make sure you are using the same paralel port cable as you were with the windows 98 systems.

Thanks hwood , I tried all, the parallel port is working fine bat only not with my hardware device. parallel port is working fine. I think something we have to add to access the parallel port in win2000 for extra hardware devices to communicate with software. do you know any such kind of information. please let me know.

NT systems not being based on M$DOS do not allow direct access to ports like under W9x, therefore you will need to find software which will allow this. This article for NT4 applies to W2K and though DOS based may give some hints. http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Content/226/03/1.html

thanks for reply Mr.x86 I will try that. Thank you very much.

In both Windows 95/98/ME and in Windows NT/2000/XP you need a device driver to circumvent HAL. Unfortunately, a completely different device driver is needed for each OS type. For instance, in Windows 95/98/ME, if it was written in VB you could use io.bas, which is shareware and widely available. Under windoze NT/2000/XP I would recommend the driver from: http://zealsoft.com/ However, the calls to the driver module are different, so you have to rewrite the original software. Good luck, ken