Ryan McGinnis
EF5
I've discovered a solution to getting Delorme's serial emulator to work with Vista.
Basically, the first thing you do download Delormes serial port emulator from http://www.delorme.com/support/supporttemplate.aspx?id=319. Many of you have already done this. However, if your system is like mine and many others out there, the serial emulator is not a big friend of Vista, and doesn't seem to work. (Mine runs fine, but other applications don't actually get to see the data that it supposedly is emulating.)
What you have to do is go into the start menu, go down to the search box at the bottom, and type in "Delorme". Don't hit enter, just wait for the stuff to pop up at the top of the start window. Up there, you will see a program called "SerEmul". Right click it, and go to properties. Click the Compatibility tab. Check the box that says "run this program as an administrator", then click OK. Restart. Upon restart, Vista will tell in the lower right taskbar when you when you login that it blocked the program from running (probably a virus prevention measure). What you want to do is click the box where it tells you that, then tell it to run the program. After this, you close the Delorme Serial Emulator that resides in your taskbar and then run it again (basically, the Serial Emulator must be restarted). That's it, you're done -- it should work now. Every time you reboot you'll need to go to the taskbar and unblock the program and then restart the serial emulator, but it's not the end of the world. So far I've had no problems, though the docs that come with the program itself says that it doesn't like coming out of sleep mode. I've got it running Delorme, SN, and GR3 all at once.
The alternate, easier solution is to disable Windows User Accounts Control. But this leaves your system much more open for viruses/trojans. Personally, I prefer the short dance of commands at startup to leaving my whole computer open.
It's a shame Delorme's emulator is so poorly coded. I've sent them an email explaining the problem; hopefully they'll get around to issuing a patch one of these days.
Basically, the first thing you do download Delormes serial port emulator from http://www.delorme.com/support/supporttemplate.aspx?id=319. Many of you have already done this. However, if your system is like mine and many others out there, the serial emulator is not a big friend of Vista, and doesn't seem to work. (Mine runs fine, but other applications don't actually get to see the data that it supposedly is emulating.)
What you have to do is go into the start menu, go down to the search box at the bottom, and type in "Delorme". Don't hit enter, just wait for the stuff to pop up at the top of the start window. Up there, you will see a program called "SerEmul". Right click it, and go to properties. Click the Compatibility tab. Check the box that says "run this program as an administrator", then click OK. Restart. Upon restart, Vista will tell in the lower right taskbar when you when you login that it blocked the program from running (probably a virus prevention measure). What you want to do is click the box where it tells you that, then tell it to run the program. After this, you close the Delorme Serial Emulator that resides in your taskbar and then run it again (basically, the Serial Emulator must be restarted). That's it, you're done -- it should work now. Every time you reboot you'll need to go to the taskbar and unblock the program and then restart the serial emulator, but it's not the end of the world. So far I've had no problems, though the docs that come with the program itself says that it doesn't like coming out of sleep mode. I've got it running Delorme, SN, and GR3 all at once.
The alternate, easier solution is to disable Windows User Accounts Control. But this leaves your system much more open for viruses/trojans. Personally, I prefer the short dance of commands at startup to leaving my whole computer open.
It's a shame Delorme's emulator is so poorly coded. I've sent them an email explaining the problem; hopefully they'll get around to issuing a patch one of these days.
