At 07:41 PM 2/26/1998 Cliff Mark wrote:
>
>ISomeone I know is having problems allocating Com ports as follows:
>
>Com port 1 - Mouse
>Com port 2 - Used for external "Ham Radio" device
>Com port 3 - internal modem.
>
>Needless to say the internal modem doesn't work.
>I thought you could only have/use  2 Com ports at a time? but he insists
>that it should be possible.


Cliff:

Traditionally COM 1 and COM3 share IRQ4
and COM2 and COM4 share IRQ3.

You can install COM ports which share the
same IRQ (Interrupt ReQuest) resource
but you can NOT use the two COM ports at
the same time.

Here, a mouse on COM1 would be used in Windows
all the time. So when you tried to use the modem
on COM3, it wouldn't work.

I suggest:  If you don't use the Ham equipment
when you use the modem, then put the modem
on COM1 and the HAM gear on COM3, with the
mouse on COM2.

I always put my mouse on COM2 anyway, since
COM2 has a higher priority than COM1 or COM3
(IRQ3 has a higher priority than IRQ4).  HTH.

Regards,

John Chin