20-147 Cable, Pro-95, and Vista

JohnSc1 · #1 (**permalink**) 02-21-2009, 06:57 PM

I am posting this because I have not been able to find any information on this combination of hardware and OS. It seems nobody wants to talk about Vista. I decided to just wing it and see what happened, and I hope this helps someone down the line.

First, there are NO drivers included for Vista on the CD that comes with the cable. Don't even put the CD in your drive! When you plug the cable into a USB port, Vista asks if you want to search for drivers, let it find them. You will end up downloading and installing drivers for the USB AND a serial port. There are two things to download and it happens one at a time. This all comes from Microsoft's Update website. When mine finished, it assigned COM 14 (yes, thats COM Fourteen) to the port.

All you have to do is be sure your programmer software, whatever it is, is looking at the correct COMM port, and it is NOT necessarily a low number.

From what I have been reading here, this process is easier in Vista than just about any other OS. Oh, I almost forgot, Win95 for the Pro-05 scanner works perfectly with Vista. I have the 32 bit version and will not be able to try it on the 64 bit Vista.

Good Luck and have fun.

zzdiesel · #2 (**permalink**) 03-29-2009, 01:33 AM

I just started having issues with the cable on Windows 7 x64 bit Beta.

It downloads drivers through Windows Update just like Vista, but they bluescreen on Win 7 on the reboot. The cable even works with Win500 before I reboot

JohnSc1 · #3 (**permalink**) 03-29-2009, 09:09 AM

I beta tested Vista for over a year before it was actually published, and had similar issues with "several" peripherals. As things progress through the beta cycle for Win7 I am sure your problem will disappear just as my other driver problems did with Vista beta. The only thing I can suggest for now is to just use a Vista machine to do your programming and as updates come out for Win7, try it again on that machine. When I first posted about Vista, it was because I was not able to find "in advance" of using the cable, and really didn't want to invest in one till I found out something. However laziness prevailed and I went ahead on my own. Happily, things worked out and Vista was able to come up with drivers. I am sure Win7 will end up doing the same thing, we may have to wait till just before publication. If you have a 32 bit machine, you might try Win7 32 bit. They always seem to have those drivers well in advance of the 64 bit versions. I have a 64 bit Vista machine, but I have not tried the scanner cable with it, so I really do not know if there even IS a Vista 64 bit driver. That does bring up a possibility. If you are doing your Win7 beta test on a 64 bit machine and have it set up as a dual boot with Vista 64 bit as the other OS, see if it works with Vista 64. If it does, problem solved and you can just about count on Win 7 eventually having drivers as well..

zzdiesel · #4 (**permalink**) 03-29-2009, 01:30 PM

Thanks John. To tell you the truth; I am triple booting. I have x86 XP, Vista x64 and Win 7 going. I do use Vista for Win500 programming. I was wondering if anyone else was trying the Win 7.

ac7xc · #5 (**permalink**) 06-03-2009, 11:32 PM

The drivers for the RS 20-047 are here:
FTDI Drivers
Look for the FT232B driver in the VCP driver section.
Have fun.

ac7xc · #6 (**permalink**) 06-03-2009, 11:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zzdiesel

Thanks John. To tell you the truth; I am triple booting. I have x86 XP, Vista x64 and Win 7 going. I do use Vista for Win500 programming. I was wondering if anyone else was trying the Win 7.

I tried out Win7 for a week but you really need 2 Gigabytes of memory or it starts to crawl. I have 1 gig now and that wasn't enough on a pentium 4 3 GHz