[Barrykgerdes]

Hi

Modern laptops do not have parrallel ports which is often a nuisance for us users of equipment that operates from these ports.

Some of the older ones have a PMCIA slot where a parallel port can be added but these are quite rare now also.

The USB-parallel port devices are designed only to drive a printer and lack the control of feeding data to an assigned port and are completely useless for parallel port tasks other than driving a printer.

However standard PC's still usually have a PCI slot available and there are parallel port cards available for these.

Further to this Vista, XP, Windows 7 have inhibited the direct access to ports as part of their security policy which means that even if you have a parallel port card you may not be able to drive your equipment. However there is a work around for this that runs a short program to patch the operating system. Google "userport.sys"

Barry