USB parallel interface?

[sjwright]

Hi

One of my clients is a motorcycle showroom, and their stock management system is a clunky old 16bit DOS based app. We've recently renewed some of their computers with Acer Aspire Revo's.

Problem is, they need a parallel port for their label printer and scanner, is there a USB parallel interface out there so we can still use the parallel based peripherals? I have looked but all I can find is USP to parallel printer cables which is not what we need.

Thanks in advance!
Ste

[MarkRae]

http://www.amazon.co....r-Cable/dp/B0000AKL3D

"Allows plug and play connection of all your parallel devices", according to the blurb...

[ChuckFickens]

Problem is that one on Amazon will install as a USB device, not a LPT port so printers will work fine (just set the port to the virtual USB port) but the scanner won't work.

Is there anything special about the scanner, as it may be easier to replace it with a USB scanner.

[sjwright]

@ChuckFickens This is the problem, I'm not sure if a USB scanner will work with DOS though, DOS was a little before my time, being a child of 86 and all!

[MarkRae]

OK, how about this?
http://www.google.co....um=4&ved=0CDIQ8wIwAw#

According to the machine's spec, it has one mini PCI Express expansion slot. And, according to the blurb about this device, it turns a mini PCIe slot into one serial port and one parallel port. I should say I have no direct experience of this, and found it by Googling...

[ChuckFickens]

I'd say good call on that one ^

You'd have to remove the wireless card from the mini PCI slot and do some interesting things to get the ports outside the case, but it should work.

I have had a far amount of experience of this sort of stuff, we use a lot of old parallel chip programmers where I work and I've never found a suitable USB adaptor, I always have to fit a PCI based port when needed.

[MarkRae]

Perhaps time to persuade the client that it's time to bite the bullet and drag them screaming into the 21st century.

Sounds like they could benefit from a jobbing IT consultant who's old enough to remember DOS very well and has lots of experience of upgrading software... ;-)

[rojash]

We hit a similar problem when we upgraded one of our clients. The way we got round it was to take one of their old machines, connect the parallel printer to it and share it. We then used the Net capture command on the new machines to redirect the parallel port to the one on the old machine.

[rojash]

Oops! (really showing my age there) Net Capture was Novell, I meant of course, NET USE

[ChuckFickens]

Novell was a good OS in it's day :)

Problem with net use is you can't share a scanner on the network.