we are running a old version of KMC wincontrol. Wincontrol for windows version 2.1.4 < subnet only>. it was old computer we had and was still running windows 98. i upgraded the computer and still worked fine so and i upgraded to windows xp and now when i start wincontrol it comes up "can not connect to panel. error reading system name".

i checked setting and everything looks fine. do you have any idea what i am doing wrong?

 

I'm not familiar with KMC Wincontrol in particular, but a lot of software that runs on older versions of MS Windows won't run correctly on newer versions, especially if it has to talk directly to the hardware.

If it is doing any serial communications you are probably simply out of luck. If it is using Ethernet, poke around in the firewall and "security" settings. The OS may be blocking all communications on that port (or those ports).

If the software needs a serial or parallel port dongle, you might also be out of luck.

However, if you are going through this effort you might want to think about why you would use MS Windows XP. Microsoft is getting ready to pull the plug on that so it will soon be just as obsolete and unsupported as MS Windows 98. MS Vista is their current operating system, and MS Windows 7 is the upcoming minor upgrade to that. A lot of software that work on MS Windows 2000/XP won't work on MS Windows Vista/7, so a lot of people are going to be in the same boat again before too long.

If it runs fine on MS Windows 98, why not just leave it? If you are worried about the long term future for hardware support, then MS Windows XP is the wrong choice because it doesn't have a long term future either (there is already lots of hardware on the market that XP won't run on).

What some people do in this situation is they run the old OS and software in a virtual machine (VM) and then run that on top of any OS (MS Windows, Linux, BSD, etc.). That can be a fair bit of work though, and a lot of VMs don't support serial ports (although some do).

 

Try different baud rates (on com port AND in winXL of course). Default for me was 9600...38400 worked.

 

You need a new version of the communicator interface (part# KMD-5557). The 5557 is not compatible with anything above Windows 98.