USB serial Adapter in XP- how to???

M

mpower88

Bit poster
Hi, I am using XP on an imac 2ghz core2duo using the latest install of parallels.

I have a USB "Keyspan" serial adapter that plugs into the Mac and I want a windows app to see this as being "com 1" to communicate with a serial device.

I suppose there are two ways of going - one to emulate a com port where OSX controls the device and through parallels I emulate the com port to XP. The second way is to use the native XP software to run the serial port and have OSX not see it. What is the best way to go - what is the more reliable and easy / trouble free way of doing it.

In VPC it was easy, I just installed the OSX driver and then VPC had an option to emulate a com port from it - and it worked very easily I'm surprised it's not that easy in parallels, they should impliment that kind of feature.

Thanks,

Miklos.
 
mpower88 said:
In VPC it was easy, I just installed the OSX driver and then VPC had an option to emulate a com port from it - and it worked very easily I'm surprised it's not that easy in parallels, they should impliment that kind of feature.
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I agree. Sometimes it works better that way - for instance if you are running Windows NT 4 with no USB support. I'm using a dial-up camera that is no longer supported and whose software only seems to work in Windows NT. This is a no-go with parallels since COM port mapping has not been implemented. I would like to be able to use my Apple USB modem as COM2 like I did with Virtual PC...

That being said, I have found that the IOGear USB Serial (GUC232A) works fairly well in Windows 2000, XP and Vista.
 
I think most newer USB -> serial adapters are pretty similar, so it is good to see some people having success with the latest builds of Parallels. I would think that both OSX and XP have built-in support for the USB class that these adapters report themselves as, but I could be wrong.

I'm still not clear on the order of setup - if you get the converter recognized in OS X, then Parallels can make it available to Windows? Or do you want only one or the other OS to recognize it at a time?
 
Just installed the IOGear GUC232A USB to Serial adapter today. It would not work with the driver installed on the OSX side. I would get the error in Parallels that the usb device was in use by another process. I then uninstalled the OSX drivers and brought up Parallels and connected the USB to Serial adapter. The adapter was recognized and Windows XP did install the drivers. It has been working flawlessly. So I guess for now, the adapter can only be installed in OSX or in Parallels, but not in both.
 
Thank you for the info! Parallels could stand to make that concept a bit clearer since it's not exactly intuitive (to me at least). But it makes sense now.
 
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