plugable PL2303 working in Win 7 but not Win 8?

1

Hello
I have just bought a PL2303 to talk from my Win 8 PC to a serial device.

The PL2303 installed fine and shows ok in device manager on the Win 8 PC. However when I try to access my Optical Character Recognition (OCR) device over the serial connection I get the following error in the application that comes with my OCR device:
“Communication Port Not Found. Please verify your settings in the option menu”
When I look in the options menu I can see the USB / COm port and it is selected.

When I have used this same OCR device, software and PL2303 on a Windows 7 machine then it all worked fine. So I’m puzzled…

Thanks

Michael

2

Hello Michael,

Sorry to hear this. I think this problem boils down to be a legacy software issue. Older computers had COM ports built in, and these serial ports where specifically addressed by calling up an IRQ. These days, the COM port is long gone. Although these specific IRQs are still reserved in the operating system, the legacy software is essentially calling up a non existing COM port to function, thus leading us to nowhere.

This is a long shot, but you could try running the OCR software in XP mode: http://www.howtogeek.com/171395/how-t… + http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/forget-e…

Kind regards,
Patric
Plugable Technologies

3

Thanks Patric.
I’ve tried the various compatibility options in Win 8 before and no joy.

I’ll try again though given your explanation re. the Com ports.

I’ve also got an ubuntu linux machine that I can use, but I don’t think they made a linux version of the OCR software…So I may be able to get the OCR device talking to a linux PC, but won’t be able to read the OCR data…

Thanks for the suggestion again. I’ll try it later.

Michael