KC5CSG
The Awesome Blue Waffle 825
I've owned a Radio Shack Pro-668 for about a year now. For that entire year interfacing either of my two computers to the thing has been flaky at best. There is indeed a driver issue with this unit that makes interfacing with this scanner pure hell until you follow the procedures to allow the computer with the newer OS versions to install an unsigned driver. What is not being made clear in some other threads is what to look for in your device manager. The scanner will show up in the drives area and the COM port area. The COM port is where you need to install this driver once you do the whole shift-restart yadda yadda thing.
Once I figured that out my scanner and computer are singing better together than the Captain and Tennille. Here's my beef with this whole situation though. I don't know who originally made the scanner but it appears every company that supports this device (with their name stamped to it of course) does not like to make their software easily obtainable. Especially Radio Shack. They all seem to have their own version of the software and driver. NONE OF THEM ARE FRIGGING SIGNED BY MICROSOFT!!!
Call me silly but if I was going to design a scanner, build it, sell it for darned near $400, make it heavily dependent on software, driver and database upgrades you would think I would take the time and invest the little bit of money to SEND MY FRIGGING USB DRIVER TO MICROSOFT AND HAVE THE DARNED THING SIGNED!!! And then, I'm approaching lunacy now, I'd put the software and driver on a website where people can download the darned thing in case they didn't read it's jammed on the SD card so you better not lose it. Then I would make sure my "Optimize SD Card" function in the software didn't delete the two most important files that are on the SD card. That is how I lost mine. That should not fly with a $400 piece of equipment.
So, I wrote Radio Shack and they were gracious enough to send me both the Interface Software (the latest version) and the USB driver. I never got an answer as to why they didn't offer it in their Downloads Archive. So if you need the Software and/or USB Driver email me and I'll email it to you. I'll consider this one of my charitable acts this year.
materne42@gmail.com
de KC5CSG
Once I figured that out my scanner and computer are singing better together than the Captain and Tennille. Here's my beef with this whole situation though. I don't know who originally made the scanner but it appears every company that supports this device (with their name stamped to it of course) does not like to make their software easily obtainable. Especially Radio Shack. They all seem to have their own version of the software and driver. NONE OF THEM ARE FRIGGING SIGNED BY MICROSOFT!!!
Call me silly but if I was going to design a scanner, build it, sell it for darned near $400, make it heavily dependent on software, driver and database upgrades you would think I would take the time and invest the little bit of money to SEND MY FRIGGING USB DRIVER TO MICROSOFT AND HAVE THE DARNED THING SIGNED!!! And then, I'm approaching lunacy now, I'd put the software and driver on a website where people can download the darned thing in case they didn't read it's jammed on the SD card so you better not lose it. Then I would make sure my "Optimize SD Card" function in the software didn't delete the two most important files that are on the SD card. That is how I lost mine. That should not fly with a $400 piece of equipment.
So, I wrote Radio Shack and they were gracious enough to send me both the Interface Software (the latest version) and the USB driver. I never got an answer as to why they didn't offer it in their Downloads Archive. So if you need the Software and/or USB Driver email me and I'll email it to you. I'll consider this one of my charitable acts this year.
materne42@gmail.com
de KC5CSG
