Haicom 203e Serial

[Royston]

I run win XP on a laptop (Advent 6522). I have A Haicom 203e installed and run it with InfoMap Navigator Gt Britain and Ireland. My problem is when I switch on computer, my mouse pointer goes crazy across the screen, sometimes lost altogether. So, I can't control my software from the mouse pad on the keyboard. Any ideas on getting the mouse working please?



Roy

[Dave]

Roy, Have you installed a PC driver for the Haicom ? You might want to check this by right clicking on MY COMPUTER and selecting MANAGE and checking out the Device Drivers. It sounds like XP may be thinking the Haicom is another mouse and installing the wrong driver. Most applications will probably still talk to it fine as they'll be talking direct to the serial port but XP might be seeing it differently.

[Someones_Dad]

I had the same problem with the USB version of the HI-203E, even with the correct driver installed. This is how I fixed it.



Firstly, make sure you install the XP driver for the HI-203E, as Dave suggests. Plug the HI-203E in after XP has loaded and you should get a prompt for the driver to be installed.



Once the driver is installed the problem seems to occur most often when the PC is shutdown and restarted in quick succession. (I think that this is because the it is the GPS messages coming over the serial port that confuse XP and the unit will send these quicker if it has not been off for very long!) On reboot XP recognises the HI-203E as a pointing device, installs it and from then on the pointer jumps around the screen making it impossible to control windows. However, if you remove the HI-203E from the Serial-USB stub-lead, the pointer stops jumping around. Importantly, when you do this XP does not remove the pointing device from the installed devices list in Device Manager. This means you can go into Device Manager and disable the device. Once this is done things seem to behave.



I guess you could also remove the driver for this device but I think that that would just get windows to bring up an unknown device dialog.



I hope that this is useful.

[DavidW]

Though I haven't got a Windows XP system here to check it works, the best way seems to be to use the /NoSerialMice switch in the boot options in the boot.ini file.



This fix is well known to users of some UPSes who can find that certain versions of Windows, when booting, in trying to detect a serial mouse on a COM port manage to signal the UPS to shut down! It's most widely documented for Windows NT 4, but certainly exists in Windows 2000 (according to the Resource Kit) and, I believe, exists in Windows XP and 2003 as well.





With Administrator privileges, the following should work:



Right click "My Computer"

Select Properties

Select Advanced Tab

Select Settings under "Startup and Recovery"

Select Edit



To the line that represents Windows XP that probably ends /fastdetect add " /NoSerialMice:com3" (or whichever COM port you wish to exclude - obviously it's the one your GPS is on). The alternative is " /NoSerialMice" if you don't use a serial mouse at all.





Obviously you don't use the quotation marks - they're just to show the (necessary, I think) space.





Then, save the file, exit the editor and reboot.







Caution: if you get this wrong you may leave Windows unbootable - so take necessary backups and create an Emergency Recovery Disk (if that applies to Windows XP - I haven't yet got an XP machine).







David

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