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Author Topic: COM PORT & Keyboard??  (Read 3660 times)

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katberts

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    COM PORT & Keyboard??
    « on: June 10, 2010, 05:23:07 PM »
    I can't seem to find this problem anywhere so I'm hoping somebody here can help me!   Up until yesterday, my com port on my Panasonic Toughbook CF-52 was working hunky dory nice.  A coworker was using it to troubleshoot and then it happened....the terminal emulation screen went blank and you could no longer type anything to the terminal emulation program.  I uninistalled the terminal emulation program, reinstalled it - no good.  I was able to narrow down that it is not the terminal emulation program (I tried 3 of them with the same results - hyperterm, Procomm and cryptoterm) but the fact that I when I type, no letters appear on the emulation screen.  I uninstalled the com port (I'm on com port 1), rebooted the laptop and the com port was reinstalled but the same issue appears over and over and over - I cannot type to any device using com 1.  I tried changing the keyboard types on the emulation programs to no avail.  I know the com port works because I can see the OS of my cisco 3750 switch loading just fine but when it comes time for me to start configuring - nada, nothing comes on the screen.
    Has anyone ever had anything like this happen to them?  I would soooo greatly appreciate any assistance and help anyone can provide.

    Thanks very much!


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    Re: COM PORT & Keyboard??
    « Reply #1 on: June 10, 2010, 05:57:58 PM »
    we understand you are using the COM port on laptop to communicate with another device using hyper terminal or some other type of terminal in a simulation program. then suddenly it stopped working.
    Of the many things you have tried, you did not say if you had just tried using a simple hardware look back tester. This is usually the first thing we use when we suspect a com port  has gone bad. We just plug in the little gadget and see if we can talk ourselves. That is to say, on a terminal program you will type a character and that will come back and echo the character so every time you type something it chose back ike this:
    hello world
    OR
    hheellllooo wwoorrlldd
    if using half duplex.
    One of your junior technicians should have this in his test kit. If you cannot get a terminal program to work with a loop back faster, the com port is shot.

    But it it does work on the loop aback test, you have bad cable(s).


    katberts

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      Re: COM PORT & Keyboard??
      « Reply #2 on: June 10, 2010, 06:18:03 PM »
      Ah!  I didn't even think about a loopback tester.  I've never used one with a com port so I'm not sure how they're made up - can you help me with that?  I've got my phone guys that  can make it if I know the pin outs.

      Thank you sooo very much!!!

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      katberts

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        Re: COM PORT & Keyboard??
        « Reply #4 on: June 10, 2010, 07:35:34 PM »
        thank you sooo very much for all of your help on this!!!!  I'll let you know what happens!