Capture port data from COM3 on Windows 7 machine

[mgookin]

Hello:

I'm a college student doing a self funded project. I have a device (lux meter) connected to COM3. The software which came with it works great but only collects 16,000 lines of data, then throws my data away. I need at least 50,000 lines of data. I would prefer to have unlimited data capability.

I have downloaded dozens of software programs over the past few weeks and none of them will collect even one line of data.

I'm trying to figure out how to capture the data directly from COM3 to a txt file. I'm running Windows 7 on the subject computer.

Does anyone know how I can collect port data from COM3 directly into a txt file?

Thanks in advance.

[BC_Programmer]

Not sure if this helps:

http://www.virtualserialport.com/products/rs232-data-logger/

it looks like it is what you are looking for, but maybe you already tried it.

[mgookin]

Thanks for the suggestion. I had tried that program without success.

After you suggested that I did download one of their programs http://www.virtualserialport.com/products/serialmonitor/ then went into firewall to allow it access and was able to get some data. I got 10,000+ records in about 20 seconds. Looks like I need to play with the filters. And of all the data there I can't see anything which is actually the readout of the instrument.

So while it was exciting to finally see data collection, I'm still not where I need to be.

Our Plan B is run two meters -  collect just shy of 16,000 records and fire up another laptop/ instrument, save the first one, repeat process until data collection is complete and stitch the files together. It's just a pain doing all that work.

Someone told me that DOS used to provide instant access to all ports and put it in a .txt file. That would work great for me. Do you know if I could put DOS on a modern computer and collect a txt file simply?