[NLRS] Lady Heather Problem....

[Chris Elmquist]

On Wednesday (03/09/2016 at 12:56PM -0600), Bud Patten wrote:
> 
> I shut down my Thunderbolt frequency standard last fall that I had been
> monitoring with Lady Heather using Windows 8.   Over the winter I upgraded
> (?) to Windows 10 and last week fired up the Thunderbolt again to run over
> the summer.   Running Lady Heather again produced the error message "Can't
> open port \\.\n <file://./n>  ".     n being 1 to 6 that I changed in the
> "Properties" window after right clicking on the Lady Heather icon.   Do any
> of you have an idea as to what I'm missing here?   Any thoughts will be
> appreciated.   
> 
> Please - No cracks about "Lady Heather".. ;-)

How 'bout cracks about Windows?  ;-)

The error message seems to contain a reference to a file (ie, a path
and filename) rather than a reference to a serial (COMx:) port.
Perhaps the configuration or registry for the application got "adjusted"
and no longer knows how to reach an actual serial port device.  I don't
do Windows but I do know that you don't reference serial ports like
files on that platform.  They are COMx: devices without any pathname to
a device node like we find on Linux or Unix platforms.

Checking here,

http://www.ke5fx.com/heather/readme.htm

Looks like he keeps the config in a file called HEATHER.CFG in the same
directory where the executable lives.  You might be able to just delete
that config file and start fresh.

There may also be 16-, 32-bit vs 64-bit issues at play here as well as
lack of DOS app support in Windows10.

There may be some insight here,

http://www.howtogeek.com/228689/how-to-make-old-programs-work-on-windows-10/

such as the "WindowsXP Mode" and "DOSBox" discussions.

Chris
-- 
Chris Elmquist NØJCF