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Dell gx620 USB Serial adapter - handshake problem

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lmohr79

Technical User
Jan 18, 2005
39
US
I work in a financial environment and am troubleshooting our newest Dell build Optiplex GX620. There are 2 special peripherals attached that are actually serial devices - Epson impact printer and a MICR reader. Due to the logic that the MICR device (and connected card reader) use, I want it to stay on the serial port using COM1. The impact printer is an Epson TM-U295, which is attached using a USB-serial adapter on COM2. Because of the size of the GX620, there are no expansion slots, so an additional serial port is not an option.

The printer worked fine with the adapter on our previous builds (GX270 and GX280), but with this latest build, the printer "stutters" - actually double prints some characters on the validations. For example, DEPOSIT might print as DEPOSISIT, or $300.00 might print as $3$300.00 or $300.00.00.

I reconfigured the COM ports in the Device Manager so that the Serial Port is COM2 and the USB-Serial is COM1, switched the cables, so the printer is plugged directly into the PC, and all works fine. But this is not a good solution - we've got several machines already in production with the original configuration, which works fine. And due to the volume of workstations (500+), I want to keep the variations of the configurations to a minimum.

Dell support has encountered this issue with the USB-serial adapters, but does not have a good answer - they had me flash the bios and check to verify the Windows update - and then went on to tell me that the previous cases of this were not resolved and they really have no idea.

So - I'm willing to adjust port settings, etc., but don't have any idea where to start - I'm open for suggestions!!!
 
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