We've been running Street Atlas and VMSpc on an HP laptop with XP Home for the past several years. We bought the USB to serial adapter through Silverleaf to allow us to connect their cable to the laptop. Everything has run fine.
The laptop is now 4 years old and I got nervous about it, so I ordered a new HP laptop but this one is AMD Dual Core 2.2 running Vista 64bit. Without a driver for the USB serial adaptor, Vista will not allocate a Comm port and VMSpc won't run. I went to the manufacturer's websit (
BAFO Technologies), selected the Vista 32/64 driver and installed it. The installation proceeds without error. When, however, the cable is plugged in, Vista recognizes it as new hardware, starts the install process and then either:
- blue screens with a buffer overflow error or
- hangs with horizontal color bars across the display.
A power off/on is the only recovery. One such failure resulted in Vista having to go through a long Recovery operation.
It is clear to me that the driver is not 64 bit Vista compatible. I researched the Microsoft website and found another manufacturer's cable/driver that MS says is 64bit Vista compatible. I downloaded and installed the driver and have ordered the cable through Amazon. There is no guarntee that the cable is not going to crash Vista or that if the cable completes the installation, the result is going to work with VMSpc. I won't know about either of those until the cable gets here.
I had written to a second manufacturer and they also claim Vista64 bit compatibility. It was more difficult finding a supplier for their cable, however.
In case anyone else is struggling through this problem, at least you will know that you aren't alone.
Charlie