Hi! John,

On 05 Oct 96  18:13:56, John Piper whispered to Frank Iuston:

 JP> On Wednesday, October 02 1996, Frank Iuston wrote to All ...

 FI> I have an IBM 486 slc 2, comprising of a single speed cd rom (one i
 FI> need a driver for ..), 1.44 floppy, 130 mb hard disk, sb pro
 FI> card plus mouse and scanner. I have an internal 14.4k modem...this is
 FI> where the problem lies.
[ ...trim... ]
 JP> anything at all, configure your modem to use COM4. COMs 2 and 4 share
 JP> the same IRQ, so provided that you have nothing plugged into COM2,
 JP> COM4 is free for use.
 JP> You'll need to refer to your trusty modem manual for instructions on
 JP> how to configure it for a certain COM port/IRQ combination. Have fun
 JP> .

Oops, then he'll have other problems when the BIOS/Windows can't find COM3 and
will allocate the COM3 base address against COM4.  :)

A good alternative is to set the existing COM2 as COM4 and install the
internal as COM2.

There is a 'school of thought' in the international COMM echo that since COM2
has a lower IRQ, then that device will get serviced at a higher rate than a
device on COM1.

Also, a lot of software has difficulties dealing with internals set as COM4.
Case in point: a BNU/FrontDoor setup on a spare 2400 internal that I have will
not work and I don't have any gaps in port allocation - FrontDoor spits the
dummy every time.

Cheers,
Paul.


... " ...and all the Borg left was this macintosh."
--- FD2.12/RA2.02/FE1.45+/WFWG3.11!