Dick is having trouble posting this today, so I'm forwarding it to the
list for him.
Eric
*From:* Dick Dievendorff [mailto:
[hidden email]]
*Sent:* Monday, January 14, 2008 2:19 PM
*To:* 'Elecraft List'
*Subject:* K3 - Windows Blue Screen with USB to Serial Adapters during
firmware load. New Device Drivers required.
Elecraft has received a number of reports of very slow firmware load,
sometimes accompanied by a Windows “blue screen”, when using some USB to
Serial Adapters when loading the DSP with the most recent versions of
the K3 Utility.
Many USB to Serial Adapters, including the Elecraft KUSB, contain a
Prolific Technologies Chip Set, and some of the earlier Prolific device
drivers (including the one on the CD shipped with the KUSB) suffer
exceptions during error recovery situations. The result is a Windows
“Blue Screen”.
If you have this sort of USB to Serial adapter, the remedy for the class
of errors we’ve seen is to install an updated Prolific USB to Serial
Adapter device driver.
To determine what driver you have installed now, on Windows 2000, 2003,
XP and Vista:
1) Plug the USB to Serial Adapter into a USB port on your computer. It
doesn’t need to be connected to the K3 for this test.
2) Right click the “Computer” or “My Computer” and select “Manage”.
3) In the left pane of “Computer Management”, select “Device Manager”.
4) In the right pane tree view, click the + sign next to Ports (COM and
LPT).
5) Look for a COM port that says something like “Prolific USB-to-Serial
Comm Port (COM4)”
6) Double click that entry to open a Properties viewer, and select the
“Driver” tab.
7) The driver manufacturer (Prolific) and driver version should be
visible on the Driver tab.
If you are using Windows Vista, the appropriate device driver is the one
you get from Windows Update when you first plug in the USB to Serial
Adapter. I have version 2.0.2.1, and it works fine with the K3 Utility.
If you are using Windows XP, Windows 2000, or Windows 2003, the
currently available device driver is version 2.0.2.8, and it’s available
from the Prolific web site,
http://www.prolific.com.tw/eng/downloads.asp?ID=31. This driver may also
work on Vista, but I haven’t done that as I’m getting working drivers
from the Microsoft Update facility.
Prolific Driver version 2.0.2.4 also works fine with the K3 Utility.
If you’re using the driver that came on the CD with the KUSB, this is an
update you really want to make. We’ve had at least a half-dozen reports
of this sort of failure, and all were corrected by installing the
current device driver from the Prolific site.
The K3 Utility issues standard Windows 32 API serial port requests.
However sometimes in error recovery situations a pending asynchronous
Read operation must be cancelled (we waited a while, and it didn’t
complete in time), and cancelling pending I/O has on occasion been an
area of difficulty for some device drivers. It’s hard to test. Prolific
has it right now.
The link to the Prolific web site is in the Troubleshooting section of
the K3 Utility Help, and Eric has recently added a link to the Prolific
Technologies driver update web page on the Elecraft K3 Software page at
http://www.elecraft.com/K3/k3_software.htm.
The chipset in the KUSB is a Prolific Technologies 2303, and the top
link on the page is the appropriate driver. Version 2.0.2.8, the file is
named
*wd_pl2303_v20019v2028.zip*
Dick, K6KR
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