[NTLK] My new serial cable

[Jeremy O'Brien]

Well I suppose I should eat my words. After much experimenting last
night, I couldn't even get notes to sync anymore. I'm running windows XP
in a virtual machine on my mac, using a serial->USB cable with a chipset
that is unsupported in OS X, and barely supported in Windows. I tried
three instances of the regular slowdown last night, but felt it might be
excessive, so I quit. I will try with 5+ today. If that fails, I will be
attempting network sync with NCX for the umpteenth time. So many ways to
sync a newt, yet each one is hit or miss. It makes me sad. I hope once I
get my prolific-based serial->USB cable, I will be able to sync to NCX
without issue...

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 06:18:51AM -0700, Stefan Thorsteinson wrote:
> Hi Jeremy,
> 
> FWIW: I use NCU on an LG notebook (Intel 2 CPU T5600, 1.83Ghz) running XP
> Pro with Slowdown. I'm not sure we are using the same version of slowdown.
> Mine is a 2" square window with two sliders-Seed & Reaction. I only use the
> speed slider and find that I require about 5 instances of Slowdown at max
> reduction in order to get a stable connection. I use the Keyspan USA-19HS
> serial adapter. I've found that if there is any misalignment of the planets
> or the speed of dust has changed, I may have to run a sixth instance of
> slowdown with the slider at 50%. It took some experimenting to come up with
> this combination. My test was doing a backup. Most of the time I didn't get
> an error until it came to backing up packages. Everything else backed up
> fine.
> 
> I'm surprised you are getting away with only one instance of Slowdown. Of
> course, depending on your processor and  flavor of Slowdown YMMV. Have you
> tried any more instances or increasing the percentage of Slowdown to see if
> that helps? I can't speak for individual files as I'm usually just backing
> up everything. HTH.    
> 
> Cheers,
> Stefan Thorsteinson
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: newtontalk-bounces at newtontalk.net
> [mailto:newtontalk-bounces at newtontalk.net] On Behalf Of Jeremy O'Brien
> Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 2010 12:22 AM
> To: newtontalk at newtontalk.net
> Subject: Re: [NTLK] My new serial cable
> 
> On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 09:36:48AM +0200, Pnemonic wrote:
> > Newton doesn't understand USB. It has to convert USB to Serial. And 1GHz+ 
> > processors have timing problems.
> > 
> 
> Alright, so I decided to try and get NCU working again while I wait for
> my $4.00 prolific usb->serial converter to arrive. I am running a
> slowdown program that allows you to specify a percentage to slow down a
> particular program. Using 1-5% allows me to transfer notes just fine,
> but I still get a communications error (-1) whenever I try to export
> works files. It gets to the point where it asks me what works files to
> export, and while I'm choosing, the newton says "waiting for a
> response...". I then choose the file I want, hit export, and that's when
> the communication error happens. Has anyone seen this before?
> 
> Thanks,
> Jeremy