[wp34s] MySamba and Windows 7

[lcwright1964]

For a couple of years I have flashed my wp34s collection with MySamba under WinXP in a VMWare Fusion virtual machine on my Mac. The only problem I ever had was when there was a mechanical problem with one of the calculators. Otherwise, if I follow the flashing instructions and use a support FTDI USB-serial converter, all is perfect.

There have been some troublesome bugs with XP of late and it seems unlikely that Microsoft will fix them prior to ceasing support for the older OS later this year. I bit the bullet and stepped up to 32-bit Windows 7 Ultimate, again running in a virtual machine on my Mac. I have never been a Windows fan, but so far all is well for most of what I need it for.

Most of my calculator-based stuff that worked under XP works fine here, particularly Jeff Garnier's ILPer interface for the PILBox and Diego's software for programming my Nov64. The original wp34s emulator runs just fine too.

MySamba is a different matter. It launches fine, and I can navigate to the .bin flash file I need. However, there are no selections in the drop-down box for the COM port field. Entering the COM port used manually--and Device Manager tells me that my USB-Serial converter is detected fine and assigned to a port--doesn't work either. However, I go back to an XP virtual machine and MySamba behaves as it should.

Is this behaviour--MySamba not locating the COM ports when run under Windows 7--known behaviour for this? I really don't want to keep a buggy XP installation just to flash my calcs when the Windows 7 works beautifully for everything else.

Thanks in advance,

Les