[Scaleo P] parallel pci card & bios flash help...

[mark370]

hi guys got a good question for ya / dilema.

i have a scaleoP P5GD1-FM with a ASUS mother-board running win XP sp2 , and it has No 25pin parallel port only a 9pin serial port , ive been and got a 25pin parallel PCI CARD and put in in , its working ok but i only have options in device manager to set up the parallel port ive got NO options in BIOS for setting ECP,EPP ect,ect witch i need for the hardware ime gona use to work.

so ive been looking around and have found that fujitsu do a SCALEO-P with win media center operating system version the same as my computer with a 25pin parallel port installed , so you see where ime going with this ,

MY QUESTION is: if i got a bios flash for the media center version and flashed my comp BIOS with it , would this then give me the options in BIOS to set the PCI CARD to EPP,ECP,ect,ect. ???

your help or views on this would be most help-full.

many-thanks mark

PS.. if you can help me and need any more info let me no wot you need.

[bigliam1970]

Hi Mark..

I can only go on my own experience of add-in IO cards in the answer I'm gonna give you here, so further research may suggest different to what I have to say.

In my experience, IO add-in cards are not normally BIOS controlled.

The rerason for this is that the BIOS is only really responsible for coordinating how the Mother Board talks to the peripherals connected to it. The Parallel card you mentioned will almost certainly have been supplied with a driver disk that is installed in XP, am I right?

For this reason, the card will only become usable once Windows starts.

Another example is when people add a USB card to allow several more usb ports to the back of their machine. Because this add-in card is (in effect) software driver controlled, you wouldn't expect a USB keyboard or mouse to function at start-up.

A client of mine couldn't work out why his computer wouldn't give him access to his BIOS settings at boot, and it was for this reason.

I have googled this problem, without much of a result my friend.

I am interested in getting feedback on this though Mark, and will gratefully receive any info on how you may have got this card to work in the manner you have described.

Post back and let us know..

Big Liam

[mark370]

thanks for your reply liam interesting , ive just rang PC performance up as ime paying for it monthly so i thought ide see if they have any ideas on this , the guy on the phone was most helpfull even though ime no further forward , he is ringing up fujitsu for me to see if they will recomend a BIOS flash for my problem [ as i said there is a machine the same as mine with the 25pin parallel port installed ] so i guess ill have to wait untill he rings me back.
i will keep you informed liam thanks.

any-one else got any-more views on this ?
or some-one with a SCALEO-P with WIN MEDIA CENTER thats got a 25pin parallel port would be nice to talk to ?

[mark370]

right the guy from PC Performance got back to me today , not good news he said fujitsu didnt want to no and they would not disclose any info about it either , so i guess ill have to find the answer som-where else ,
ime dammed if ime gona go buy a new PC just for this.
i think this stinks some-one must have a answer to this problem ???

any-body have any-more thoughts on this PLEASE....

[olshevch]

I guess that necessary settings you could find in hardware properties for your card. If they don't exist, then the driver does not support such settings.
I 'd suggest to search and asquire another parallel port adapter, which could set necessary operation modes via driver. You could consider using not only PCI, but a COM-LPT and USB-LPT adapters.