[NTLK] OMP serial connection problems

[Frank Gruendel]

The closest OMP I have at my disposal is 20m away in my shed. It's 5 degrees
Celsius below zero, snowing, and I am too tired to dress and dig it out,
so...

I dimly remember having had problems with connecting old Newtons because
there was more than one option in the Newton's "Connect" window and I (since
I tried to connect to a PC) did not use the option that sounded as if it was
made for a Mac. I don't recall the exact names of these options, but if
there's more than one, try them all and make sure to restart your host PC
between each attempt.

One thing that might help figuring things out is installing the Newton
Toolkit (NTK) directly on your Windows Vista and using your PC's physical
COM port. The Newton Toolkit will connect to all Newton models. As long as
you do not transfer any data (in which case your connection will probably
break immediately unless you slow your PC down with multiple instances of
slowdown.exe), this should be sufficient to prove that it is not your USB
adapter or its driver that's causing your problem.

I dimly recall that it was important that you tapped "Connect" on the Newton
first, then connected through NTK's Windows UI. Or the other way round. But
the order definitely is important.

Over time, I have done the above on Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows XP. I
have never done it on Vista since I've avoided this OS like the plague.

Frank

-- Newton software and hardware at http://www.pda-soft.de