[Elecraft] FW: K3 - Windows Blue Screen with USB to Serial Adapters during firmware load. New Device Drivers required.

[Eric Swartz - WA6HHQ, Elecraft]

Dick is having trouble posting this today, so I'm forwarding it to the 
list for him.
Eric

*From:* Dick Dievendorff [mailto:dieven at comcast.net]
*Sent:* Monday, January 14, 2008 2:19 PM
*To:* 'Elecraft List'
*Subject:* K3 - Windows Blue Screen with USB to Serial Adapters during 
firmware load. New Device Drivers required.

Elecraft has received a number of reports of very slow firmware load, 
sometimes accompanied by a Windows “blue screen”, when using some USB to 
Serial Adapters when loading the DSP with the most recent versions of 
the K3 Utility.

Many USB to Serial Adapters, including the Elecraft KUSB, contain a 
Prolific Technologies Chip Set, and some of the earlier Prolific device 
drivers (including the one on the CD shipped with the KUSB) suffer 
exceptions during error recovery situations. The result is a Windows 
“Blue Screen”.

If you have this sort of USB to Serial adapter, the remedy for the class 
of errors we’ve seen is to install an updated Prolific USB to Serial 
Adapter device driver.

To determine what driver you have installed now, on Windows 2000, 2003, 
XP and Vista:

1) Plug the USB to Serial Adapter into a USB port on your computer. It 
doesn’t need to be connected to the K3 for this test.

2) Right click the “Computer” or “My Computer” and select “Manage”.

3) In the left pane of “Computer Management”, select “Device Manager”.

4) In the right pane tree view, click the + sign next to Ports (COM and 
LPT).

5) Look for a COM port that says something like “Prolific USB-to-Serial 
Comm Port (COM4)”

6) Double click that entry to open a Properties viewer, and select the 
“Driver” tab.

7) The driver manufacturer (Prolific) and driver version should be 
visible on the Driver tab.

If you are using Windows Vista, the appropriate device driver is the one 
you get from Windows Update when you first plug in the USB to Serial 
Adapter. I have version 2.0.2.1, and it works fine with the K3 Utility.

If you are using Windows XP, Windows 2000, or Windows 2003, the 
currently available device driver is version 2.0.2.8, and it’s available 
from the Prolific web site, 
http://www.prolific.com.tw/eng/downloads.asp?ID=31. This driver may also 
work on Vista, but I haven’t done that as I’m getting working drivers 
from the Microsoft Update facility.

Prolific Driver version 2.0.2.4 also works fine with the K3 Utility.

If you’re using the driver that came on the CD with the KUSB, this is an 
update you really want to make. We’ve had at least a half-dozen reports 
of this sort of failure, and all were corrected by installing the 
current device driver from the Prolific site.

The K3 Utility issues standard Windows 32 API serial port requests. 
However sometimes in error recovery situations a pending asynchronous 
Read operation must be cancelled (we waited a while, and it didn’t 
complete in time), and cancelling pending I/O has on occasion been an 
area of difficulty for some device drivers. It’s hard to test. Prolific 
has it right now.

The link to the Prolific web site is in the Troubleshooting section of 
the K3 Utility Help, and Eric has recently added a link to the Prolific 
Technologies driver update web page on the Elecraft K3 Software page at 
http://www.elecraft.com/K3/k3_software.htm.

The chipset in the KUSB is a Prolific Technologies 2303, and the top 
link on the page is the appropriate driver. Version 2.0.2.8, the file is 
named

*wd_pl2303_v20019v2028.zip*

Dick, K6KR