atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Toshiba Telephones & Systems TIP: virtual PC, usb to serial adapter, stratagy admin

tryin to give back to the forum a bit...

Finding laptops with serial ports is getting difficult, and i found a pretty sweet solution.

I installed MS virtual PC 2004 on my laptop with winxp pro (no serial ports), loaded an image of windows 98, transferred my copy of stratagy admin into the virtual PC, and that is how i am able to login to my stratagy flash. the virtual pc software allows you to specify which com port to map for the usb/serial adapter, so there's no issues there. its sweet.

if any of you need help setting it up, feel free to send me a PM.

Is MS virtual PC 2004 a free download from icrosoft?

Yes it is. Here's the link virtual pc2007

First, good afternoon to all, this is my first post here. As a lurker, I have very much enjoyed and benefited from the knowledge at hand.
I'm in the process of trying something similar to connect to a Strata CTX28 system's GVMU. Only in my case instead of using the PC's USB ports, I'm thinking of getting a USB-Ethernet server (the Ubox2100) from Lantronix, and USB-to-Serial adapter (the adapter must work out of the box without special software). Presumably I will then be able to connect through the LAN. It's convoluted, but the particular installation warrants it. I'm not getting my hopes high though, the problem is that my laptop HAS a serial port. I think classybum's happy solution came about because his laptop doesn't have serial ports to begin with.
I tried for the longest to get Uadmin 2.1 connect through the LAN using a serial-to-ethernet server. These devices, as you may know, create "virtual" serial ports on PCs. The problem is Uadmin 2.1. It's old-style DOS software that insists on using the physical COM1 (and ONLY that) as the serial port, so you have to find a way of remapping the physical COM1 that Uadmin uses to whatever virtual COM port is created by the serial-to-ethernet server and its software. Unfortunately the serial-to-ethernet servers I tried could create only Windows virtual ports (as would be expected, in 2007). And as I mentioned earlier, Uadmin takes direct, physical control of the serial port, which means it bypasses Windows (and the safeguards that Windows imposes on hardware control by applications). So I could not get it to work. Not with the serial server's drivers. Not with Virtual PC. Not with special software that remap Windows ports into DOS ports. Not even after disabling the PC's serial ports so that the "new" serial port created would, by default, be COM1. In the end it wasn't worth it.
Haven't lost hope though, the Ubox is inexpensive enough to give it a try. In the meantime, it would be nice if Toshiba came up with a solution that doesn't involve massive upgrade.

Perry