Anyone use the Aten IC-164 parallel adapters for printers?

[WizTech]

Hello, I have been using the Aten high speed parallel adapters with samsung SRP -350 thermal printers in kitchens and am experiencing failures now.
These adapters are great because they use telephone wire and can be run 1000 feet but I am wondering if they are the cause of our computer parallel ports failing as well as thermal printers.
This is my first post on this board and I am really glad I found it! I have been looking for a forum related to POS for a long time.
So....anyone out there have any experience with these adapters?

 

[DTSMAN]

We use those adapters for Mcdondalds older systems and they work just fine with ithaca and epson printers.
On our regular POS systems we only use serial printers and we run cat5 to them and use rj45 adapters on each end. Mostly because it is easier to cable the building that way and techs only have to carry cat5 patch cables and not have to worry about homemade serial ends in the field. I havent seen remote parallel printers in a long while.

 

[WizTech]

Thanks for replying
We started using these because our computers use all available com ports and the parallel is always available.
Plus, the parallel/thermals print fast and clear.
But lately I am seeing these failures and it's got me worried. I foud one of these adapters (the one attatched to the cpu) with a burn hole in it and the cpu parallel port needed to be replaced as well.
At that same location I lost 3 additional sets of adapters
along with another parallel port earlier in the year.
This went away after I had the customer move the power for the thermal printer to a different electrical outlet but I wish I knew how/why the outlet power could have caused all this? There are other stories but......
I'm gonna stop here cause I could go on for a long time!
I just don't want to have 100 of these installed and end of having to go back to 50 of those locations to replace parallel ports/printers etc...

 

[DTSMAN]

Power is always an issue in the POS enviroment. Bad power has been known to blow nic cards and corrupt data and sharing a circut with compressor equipment will get you every time. We put a smart power battery backup on every terminal and fileserver we put out, and if possible ask the customer to put in an electrical circut just for their computers that is isolated and dedicated. If you suspect power as an issue we use the Fluke VR101s to test their power. You plug it into the outlet and let it run for ever how long you want to test for and then hook it to your computer and read the results. It is about the size of a pack of cigs.

 

[WizTech]

Thanks Bospruell I didn't know about the Fluke VR101S
So now I just need to convince the boss that we need one;-)
I did get him to spring for an Ultra-X PCI card.....
I am really thinking that my problem lies in the power to the thermal printers or the printers themselves? and from there it's taking out the adapters and the parallel ports.
These printers are just plugged into an outlet in the kitchen areas.

Thanks again for your responses!