[Ham-Computers] Lack of com ports problem

[Roumen Ivanov]

Hello,

One of my friends Marko, LZ2US, has an old Pentium 100 MHz computer. He
is doing a pretty good work with it especially for e-mail and EME
navigation. The day before yesterday I installed on a new hard drive on
his computer Windows 98 Second Edition and copied all of the old
programs and e-mails he had on his old hard drive which had Windows 95
installed on it. Everything was OK except that I encountered a problem
with com ports.
On his old hard drive he had Windows 95 running. He had 3 com ports:
com1 and com2 from the motherboard and com4 which comes from the
internal modem. He used com1 to connect the serial mouse and com2 to
connect occasionally an old digital camera Kodak DC20 which he used.
Everything worked well, except that he complained that when he connected
the digital camera to com2 the modem refused to work. But it was still
OK because when he used the camera he didn't used the modem and vice
versa.
Now I encountered conflict with installing three com ports on new
Windows 98 SE. One of the com ports - com2 installed with error telling
that his IRQ #3 is used by another device. I know that com1 and com3
share IRQ #4 and com2 and com4 share IRQ #3.
I removed the modem - thus I removed com4 and com1 and com2 installed
successfully but then there was a conflict with the com4 when I
installed modem back to the ISA slot. The computer suggested me IRQ # 11
for the com4 port. Unfortunately the modem can not work with this IRQ.
Finally I had to disable com2 from the motherboard's Setup BIOS and set
the modem jumper's to use com2. Now the computer works fine but how to
connect the digital camera? I need one more com port. Can somebody tell
me how to get the camera connected?
I have to mention that I am sure that this computer is old and have no
USB ports. I also didn't notice any PS/2 ports available on this
computer, because everybody knows that one possible solution is to have
PS/2 port mouse connected to PS/2 port then I have one com port free and
available for connecting the digital camera.
During all of my trials with this computer with different configurations
for com ports and the modem I always end with two com ports working OK
and one com port conflicting. I even have time when I couldn't get the
mouse working. To give more information the Windows 98 SE recognizes the
mouse as Logitech Serial Mouse and the modem as 14,400 Data Fax Voice
modem (which is correct).
Can anybody on this list help to resolve this problem?

Thank you!

Roumen, LZ4IR