sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Toshiba Telephones & Systems Strategy Voicmail software problems

My company just recieved 3 Dell 700m laptops for the field techs (me). The problem was this model of laptop has no serial or parallell ports and only 1 Type II PCMCIA slot. Since we will be using WinAdmin, DK Admin, and Strategy voicemail (VSA 3.3) software on these, we need at least 1 serial and 1 parallell port. The only single card solution I could find was the SP230 comms card from Elan Digital Systems. I just recieved the cards yesterday, and they installed with no problems on WinXP Pro. Now, every time I run the voicemail software, I get to the passowrd screen and as soon as I pres enter Windows gives me this message "NTVDM.EXE has encountered a problem and needs to close." After I get this problem worked out, I'll get to my DK admin problems. Thanks in advance for any help.

what com port you using? i believe admin only works on one or two.
m

I think that you need a comms port.I was looking for a laptop and bought inspiron that has a DB-9 port on the back and it works well

Martin is right, Stratagy Admin will onlyt work on Com 1 or Com 2.

Have you tried a USB to serial device? I heard they work well.

The serial port on the SP230 can be set to COM 1-4. I have it set to COM 2 on one laptop, and COM 1 on the other, both having the same problems.

Elan Digital Systems (the manufacturer) emailed me to say that the SP230 will not work in DOS, so I guess that is my problem. But, they will work in Linux. I don't suppose there are any ports of DK Admin or the voicemail software for Linux. Oh, how I wish everything could be configured through a telnet session.

I have heard that the USB to DB-9 adapters do not work, since you cannot set it to COM 1 or 2. If anyone knows anything different, please let me know.

You might want to look at PCMCIA serial adapters. A guy I used to work with says it works well with his DOS stuff.

The SP230 is a PCMCIA serial adapter and parallell port in one card, which I needed, since there is only one Type II slot on this laptop. Elan Digital Systems explained to me that there are no DOS drivers for multi-function cards like this one, only for the single-function ones like a single port serial card.

I did, however, create a solution. I installed Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 and created a virtual machine running MS-DOS 7.1. I then copied the voicemail software to it, and since XP sees the serial port on the card as COM 1, I could set the virtual machine's COM 1 to use XP's COM 1. After that, it was just a matter of playing with the baud rates and such. Now it works. I know this sounds like a lot of work, but now all I have to do is double click my shortcut to the MS-DOS virtual machine, let it boot, and type "ADMIN." Only one extra step.

Now, I just have to get DK Admin to see my dongle key.

I use a USB-->>DB9 serial adapter on my Dell Inspiron and it works great. You do have to go into device manager and map the USB to COM1 or COM2 to communicate with most of the older system admin programs, but I love it.

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Tim Payson
https://www.cobotyx.com