Changing the COM port numbers with the Oxford serial driver and the drivers which come with our L series cards under Windows 95/98/ME

The Oxford drivers which come with some of our PCI-bus cards and the drivers which come with our L series cards configure the serial ports starting at COM5 if you have 4 or less serial ports in your system.

If someone has a COM1 and COM2 for instance, they commonly would like the next ports to be installed to start at COM3 instead of COM5. The driver installs starting at COM5 because the port addresses aren't any of the standard COM1-COM4 addresses, thus it starts at COM5 because COM5 and above don't have any standard addresses. If you would like the port to be called COM3, for instance, even though the address isn't COM3's normal address, you can change this quite easily. To change it, please do the following:

1. Click on "Start, Run..." and press Enter. When prompted for what program to run, enter "REGEDIT" and press Enter.

2. When the Regedit program comes up, click on "Edit, Find", and search for COM5. You should see a screen pop up with COM5 listed in three places.

3. Modify the first one, "DeviceDesc" by double-left clicking on "DeviceDesc". Change it from COM5 to COM3 (or to whatever COM port you are changing it.) (Be sure not to wipe out the whole line when you go to change it. The whole thing will come up highlighted in blue. Be sure to press a cursor key to the left to start with so you can modify it without it wiping out the entire field. If you accidentally wipe out the field, click on "Cancel" instead of "OK".)

4. Modify the second one, "FRIENDLY NAME". Change it from COM5 to COM3 (or to whatever COM port you are changing it.)

5. Modify the third one, "PORTNAME". Change it from COM5 to COM3 (or to whatever COM port you are changing it.)

6. Repeat steps 3-6 if you need to change another COM port (like COM6 to COM4).

7. Exit out of regedit by clicking the "X" in the upper right hand corner.