Hardware Dongles and XP

[Colin Carpenter]

Not Mitsubishi, I know, but does anyone have any experience with hardware dongles and XP. I was asked to move a SCADA system (Wizcon v7.6) from a Windows NT4 PC to a Windows XP Pro PC. All installs OK and seems to run fine in demo mode, but it can't see the hardware dongle in the parallel port, so refuses to run in "full" mode. The PC has a "proper" parallel port and I've tried it in all the modes (ECP, EPP, bi-directional) but no joy.

[PdL]

I recently had a similar issue on a XP Citect system. On the same system where before the key was working, a new hard disk was installed with a clean XP install. After installing Citect the dongle wasn't detected. Changing port modes didn't help. The helpdesk told me to install the latest dongle driver (in the case of Citect that is the Sentinel driver). After installing the dongle was detected. Sometimes if there is a problem with the power on the parallel port it might help to attach a printer on top of the dongle. You might check if the parallel port flat cable is properly connected to the main board. Or try to remove the parallel port from the device manager and reboot so it detects the new hardware and reinstalls the driver. Hope this helps.

[Crossbow]

More than likely you'll need just like PDL said and find drivers for the hardware key. Once the drivers are properly installed, it should be supported fine. Keep in mind also that some companies offer USB keys instead of the old parallel port ones now too, so perhaps you could upgrade to a USB key.

[BobLfoot]

Like PDL I had a problem with the dongle for Entivity VLC being seen under XP. Installing the sentinel driver into XP resolved this issue as well. I'd ask your manufacturer what driver you need for the dongle and install if. If they don't know I'd try the sentinel driver it seems fairly generic for this situation.

[Colin Carpenter]

Thanks for the info. I'll definitely try the sentinel drivers and see if that makes a difference. I have contacted Wizcon direct, but, of course, they want to sell me thousands of pounds worth of updated software, which is not exactly what the customer expected when he just wanted the PC changed. They may yet come through with an updated driver, but I somehow doubt it.

[Colin Carpenter]

Well, apparently it's a HASP driver, and they don't support it under XP Pro and they want lots of money to upgrade it and now I'm fed up .....

[paulengr]

GE Proficy-xxx(pick your product) uses HASP keys (more recent versions). I didn't have any problems getting it to work on an XP-2003 machine. The only thing with HASP keys is that there's apparently an M1 and M4 version floating around which require two different software versions. Both work fine on XP 2003. If possible, I'd suggest contacting a local distributor for Wizcon. Corporate guys usually like you said want to sell software. Distributors want long term business relations.