LongDistancePaddler

NT 4.0 has no support for USB devices but Windows 2000 [NT 5.0] does support them. BSquare has software that will enable NT 4.0 to support some USB devices. Unfortunately this does not include web cameras and scanners. I want to run a Web Camera from my PC but have NT 4.0 installed. I would also like to run my scanner and printers as they are USB capable. Is there another company that provides a solution like that provided by BSquare but that also enables web cameras or scanners? Should I just bite the bullet and upgrade? If I do this should I go to 2000 or XP? Help!!!

Can anyone point me a website that allows me to downlaod drivers for the ARTEC AM12E scanner that won't kill my installation of XP? The only drivers I have are the ones I got when I bought the scanner, which was before XP existed. When I bought the scanner there was no windows 2000 or ME. My choice of operating system was NT 4.0 or 98. Naturally I went for NT 4.0. There may be a problem of drive incompatibility that is causing my system to have problems coming up.

Basically the problem is that ARTEC have not updated the drivers for the AM12E plus, and a few others, to be compatible with XP. If you have this problem and want to solve it go to www.artec.com.tw and download new drivers for your sacnner. Extract the files and then alter the properties of the setup executable. Right click on the setup.exe, select properties and then the compatibility tag. Choose windows 2000 as the target to be compatible with. After you do this you can run setup. If you have already installed drivers, remove them before you install them. Do this through control panel, add/remove hardware.

I have a Lexmark Z53 printer which I used to run connected to NT 4.0 on a parallel port. I have recently upgraded my PC to a pentium IV and changed the operating system to XP to allow me to use USB [for a web camera and digital photography]. As my Lexmark printer is capable of runniing as a USB device I thought I would install it as one on the new system. The files that are sent to it print upside down in relation to the direction they printed when the same files were printed on the old computer. When I print a file I can't set the page size as I could with the same printer when it was connected to NT. When I print a file the colours aren't the same. For example if I print something with a black square on it the print job uses a lot of ink. It uses so much that the ink almost runs on the page. How can the same printer and files behave so differently if the only real change is in the operating system. Does the change to XP really alter so much what is sent to the printer for a given file? Why is the image now upside down? Can I invert the pasted image in the doc file or do I have to paste it in to a graphics file and invert it and then paste it back into the document? The people at Lexmark have tried but I am not sure that they really understand. Help!!!

When bringing up my new system that has XP home this frequently takes more than one attempt before it actually succeeds. Once it is up it usually stays up but not always. I send a status report to microsoft and they say that the problem is caused by a device driver but can't say which one. If they can't say which one how do they know it is a device driver? I have a canon BJC 265SP for which the canon driver is apparently not certified to run with XP. This is odd because canon thinks it is. I have deleted the printer fropm the system but not disconneted it so XP may well have added it back without asking for all I know. How do I investigate this problem? Do I just take it back to the man who built the computer and ask him to trouble shoot. Being Christmas time he is closed but will be back before the end of the week. Any suggestions? I would liek to get this working to make my wife happy. It's her system you see. Fixing this problem should remove the pain from my butt.

Xiven What are we looking for here? The processor is a 2.20 ghz pentium IV. It has 256 megabytes of 266 megahertz RAM The sound is on the motherboard there is a 64 mb eagle video card. I have a DVD dirve and a CD-RW burner [liteon]. There is a canon BJC 265 SP connected but I have removed it from the control panel as the system compalined that the canon drivers were not signed for XP. I also have a Lexmark Z53 configured as a USB printer. It is giving me problems in other ways. I don't know the name of the motherboard off the top of my but I can find out if this is the sort of detail that you need. The system has a 19 inch monitor, which is really nice when watching DVD videos. I have seen a couple of episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We gave our kids Shrek and the 1st Harry Potter movie for Christmas so I expect that we will be watching them sometime soon. We will enjoy that. Back to the problem. Is there any other detail you were looking for? My PC is also custom built but not by me. I make good cakes and am generally a wizard in the kitchen but despite the fact that I work as a software engineer during the day at night I do not turn into a hardware engineer. I can install cards and drivers and things like that but building a whole PC would be beyond me.

I have a new PC, 2.0 ghz pentium IV, XP home operating system, 19 inch high res monitor etc. When we got it the sound worked in that we got the log on sounds and the radio thing worked. After a few days we lost all sound. CDs make no sound, we get no sound from the system. Our DVD player can show the images but no sound happens. Are our speakers a problem? Is it the sound card? Being a P IV the sound card is on the mother board. I expect the drivers are OK as they were installed on the system when we got it. I think the problem started before we installed PowerDVD 4.0 but I am not entirely sure. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Yes it may sound a bit dumb but the question is always worth asking. I had checked those things. The speakers had died. When we plugged them into the power the led came on but when we connected the same speakers to a midi hi-fi we have nothing happened. We used another set of speakers and it all worked fine. I am now looking for a new set of speakers for the PC to fully appreciate the 19 " monitor and DVD. I'll be putting a TV card into it over the weekend. Any suggestions?

That sounds a little bit naughty to me. I think I will borrow a CD from my employer so I can set up to do some work from home. Pretending to be an integrator, whatever that may be, sounds as if it is a but fraught with danger.

Yes I'd forgotten about that. With hard disk now much less than a cent for a megabyte why would you bother with a thin client? It looks like gotomypc or pcanywhere could be closest to an answer that you are going to get. Or you get get a blade server and then connect both PC's to it. I assume that you want to share data and software between two users. This may be the way to go. If I knew more about what you have and what you want to do I may be able to come up with a better answer.

Of course there are product like GoToMyPC and PCAnyhwere that allow you to access one PC from another one. PCAnywhere has been around for years. I ran this using Windows for WorkGroups. XP apparently has some of this capability built in, but I don't know how this runs. I don't think that this is what you want. I don't think that a monitor, mouse & keyboard are going to be enough to establish as second user. I think that what you need is referred to as a thin client, which is essentially a PC with no hard drive. You boot from the floppy and then connect to the other PC. The short answer is that I have not heard of drivers/dlls that do what you want and I suspect that they don't exist.

Well thanks very much for that information. It is pretty much as I had feared/expected. The comments vis a vis the stability of NT 4.0 against what else was available at the time has stopped 'she who must be obeyed' from being critical if my original purchase of NT. She wanted me to get 98 at the time. I got NT 4.0 to allow me to do some work from home, which I have never done. I am inclined to get windows 2000 even if it does cost a bit more, simply because of the stability that it offers. My work PC is dual boot [2000/XP] in case any of our customers are silly enough to use XP to run our product. My day job is as a software engineer but most of my experience is on Burroughs mainframes. I still tend to think like a COBOL programmer unless I make a conscious effort not to. I am intrigued by the idea of buying XP and then adding to it a Windows 2000 media kit. How do I do this? I have never before bought an operating system without a PC to go with it. That is, if you don't count LINUX, which I don't. From where do I buy the operating system? Do I get it from Microsoft? Do I go to a computer vendor? Isn't the price different if you have the software loaded onto a new PC. On the other hand I might put XP on the wife's PC and then build my own with something else on it. That might be the way to go. Thanks for the information. It has been most illuminating.

There is a company called BSquare [www.bsquare.com] who provide drivers or dlls that will allow NT 4.0 to support most USB devices. This does not include web camers or scanners but does include printer/faxes. You can download the software, the price of which is $39.95. I assume that this refers to US Dollars and not South Pacific Pesos [Ozzie Dollars]. This should work for you.