# Serial Port not working



## FGm496 (Mar 2, 2012)

I have a dell latitude E5500, it originally came with windows 7 but we wanted to back date it to Windows XP. At first none of the ports even showed in Device manager. So i did a manual add hardware...com1...03F8.....IRQ 4..... etc.
No problems there, and now it shows up in device manager with a driver from microsoft, date 7/1/2001, version 5.1.2600.0.
The problem is i can only get it to work part of the time, i'll get timeout errors with the program i'm using.
So does anybody have a idea what i can do? (i've tried changing the com in bios, changing the braud rate, and buffer size, un-installing, re-installing, using win 7 drivers, nothing.)
I believe it's the driver that's the problem but i can't find any drivers anywhere to use, Thanks in advance.


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## pip22 (Aug 22, 2004)

As you probably know, Windows 7 and Windows XP require totally different drivers for the same hardware. It was unwise to downgrade to Windows XP without first checking if Dell had any XP drivers for the E5500 - and if they haven't you should not have downgraded.

Dell hardware requires proprietary, custom-made drivers which are only available from them, so if they don't support XP on the E5500 you are going to struggle. I'm still trying to figure out why anyone one would want to downgrade from Windows 7?


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## FGm496 (Mar 2, 2012)

pip22 said:


> As you probably know, Windows 7 and Windows XP require totally different drivers for the same hardware. It was unwise to downgrade to Windows XP without first checking if Dell had any XP drivers for the E5500 - and if they haven't you should not have downgraded.
> 
> Dell hardware requires proprietary, custom-made drivers which are only available from them, so if they don't support XP on the E5500 you are going to struggle. I'm still trying to figure out why anyone one would want to downgrade from Windows 7?


Thanks for the reply, but ya i knew that, i was just banging my head against the wall and decided to try a unlikely solution. But we downgraded because it's a work computer, and some of the propriatary software we use really only works with xp for now. So we upgrade the computers but downgrade the software which isn't really working, coming to find out.


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## JimE (Apr 16, 2009)

You can change how Win7 runs programs. Simply change the file properties to run in XP compatibility mode.

As for the drivers, you can try a manual search. There is a guide at the top of the page > http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f19/how-to-find-drivers-419050.html

But it doesn't always work with OEM hardware.


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