Semi-OT: PC won't start with USB-LPT plugged in

Kind of. It refused to start this morning :-(

My layouter has that situation. Which is why his PC must be dual-boot, XP in the VM under Windows 7 does not work reliably with LPT.

True, but customers get p....d and that's never a good thing no matter what the reason. All they see is "Since I did this and that, it ain't working no more". So the last equipment connected is automatically assigned blame in their mind. That is something Microsoft does not seem to understand anymore.

No electrolytic capacitor. I opened the device to look. Hubs don't really help, tried that. The only one that sometimes works is, to my surprise, an unpowered cheap 4-port micro hub of the Amazon house brand. But only sometimes.

For now it's going to be plug-unplug and once I have some time I put a relay with time-delayed turn-on in there. That should fix it for good for the Windows 7 computer. The time delays needs to be many seconds so ye olde 74HC4060 will have to be pressed into service again.

On Tue, 08 Mar 2016 09:59:05 -0800, Joerg Gave us:

Buy the Canadian software key, which the maker condones and supports.

That's true, but the dongle makers were not our customers. Our customers were the computer and motherboard makers. And the top tier customers like IBM, Compaq, and Dell did extensive compatibility testing on all the ports.

An end user of software would complain to the software company who would complain go the dongle maker who would complain to the PC maker, who would not do anything, and eventually the dongle maker would figure out that some parallel port chips had an issue with their dongles and would contact the manufacturer and eventually it would get to me but there was nothing I could do. The motherboard maker followed our recommendations for pull-ups and terminations to achieve higher speeds on the parallel port with minimum amounts of EMI. A side effect was that those "energy harvesting" dongles would not work on a parallel port that was in compliance and so the dongle had to be redesigned.

If it's just a few cases that may be ok. But if this would be a widespread issue then word of mouth gets around not to buy your hardware but that of this other company. Because "it works". Customers don't look into the finer details of why and that it's really not you company's fault, all they see is that it doesn't work.

And it fails, too :-(

So, a relay it is. Back to Edison's times.