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Hi Roger
The laptop running XP has no problems with the GPS, but the desktop with windows ME and the old Laptop with windows 98 both had difficulty recognizing the GPS unless they were rebooted.
Raywanderin' in retirement. victor 2010

I think Ray is spot on. XP will poll the ports periodically, looking for new devices, where as any of the win9x (inc winme) don't or at least don't do it as nicely (plug and play with win9x based machines is more of a plug and pray thing), hence requiring a reboot, making sure the device is first connected. You shouldn't have to re-install the com port. There isn't another device/software trying to use that com port is there? Like an internal modem or fax software? Just that Com 1 and 3 usually by default share the same IRQ and 2 and 4 share the same one.

The thing is folks that the OS does nothing with the serial port with regard to the GPS so it don't matter a toss what it's doing with the port other than it's not being enabled/configured correctly or in use by the OS itself.

Win 98 and older MS OS have a "feature" that drops the interupt request for a serial port if it's found not to be active at boot.This particularly affects laptops with internal mouse/pointer/touchpads as they don't utilise serial ports unless a modem is attached. MS did this as a feature to speed up the OS from '95A onwards to '98 OSR2.5 (less interupts to scan more time to process). You can add a line in system.ini/cfg? to force the port/s active but it's been so long since I worked on either of these that I can't remember what it is. Rogers' problem extends from the "no active ports at boot time issue", if he is using an older generation MS OS. If the GPS is connected to the serial port and switched on at boot time the machine should activate the interupt and the mapping software will be able to see the port.

The OS will not recognise a GPS. Plug and play works via bios interogation/signature recognition. I don't think any GPS comes equiped with a plug & play bios as yet and even if it did what use would it be without the third party software.

Anyway, having crapped on about all that, Roger still needs to answer a few questions about his setup to make this any more than conjecture really.

Foss.
Bill Gates has a lot to answer for.

G'Day Roger

Maybe a good idea. Stinkpads have problems all of there own and thats all i'll say about that. you could be here for a very long time trying to sort it out.

Good luck with the convertor. It should solve your problems.
cheers.

I should also have mentioned that the GPS is a Garmin 12XL.Dodg

I guess I should tell you that I have a very similar setup. Ozi + Notebook + 12XL. Works great.

Depending on how much you want to get the GPS working with serial connection, you might want to download the driver set for your notebook from IBM and load it. There will be a few and it might take a while but all the things that go wrong now with it will probably stop going wrong. We had hundreds on thinkpads where I worked, supporting them was a nightmare. We ended up getting rid of them and using Toshiba.

With Thinkpads it's all about the right drivers for the OS you are running. Good luck with your setup.

Foss