COMM Port Question

[glasgowmike]

We have a serial to USB adaptor that plugs into the front of our PC - in the device manager and till settings, labelled COMM5. I want to get this plug out of the way and move it to a USB port in the back of the PC....so I removed the USB plug and plugged it into a spare port. I can see through the windows device manager that COMM7 is what pops up and is enabled.

Then under SETUP>THIS TILL, I changed the COMM Port to 7 (as one would think). The issue is I can not get the thing to recognize the cash drawer/printer when I switch to this other USB port/COMM7. I am using the Actinic supplied cash drawer, printer, etc. (Epson TM-T88III printer).

Any suggestions on how to get it to recognize it? Is it possible that Actinic's software won't recognize a port higher than 5? I read about this here:
http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/docs/usb010.pdf

[malbro]

We have a serial to USB adaptor that plugs into the front of our PC - in the device manager and till settings, labelled COMM5. I want to get this plug out of the way and move it to a USB port in the back of the PC....so I removed the USB plug and plugged it into a spare port. I can see through the windows device manager that COMM7 is what pops up and is enabled.

You can reset the comm port of the usb adaptor back to comm5 using the facilites in the software, see page 8 of the manual you included, usually you can set the comm port with the selector at the bottom of the screen. Windows will tell you the port is occupied but you can still overide it and make it use the previous port number as you know that comm5 was the old port number of the device.

This is a common problem with USB devices which allocate a new resource each time they are used in a different USB socket. Windows is remembering the old setting and does not know that you no longer need it.

I doubt the problem is the port number as older software only worked with comm 1 to 4 whilst newer software works with comm1 to 8 or above. As EPOS works with Comm5 I doubt using 7 is the problem but it is possible port 7 is used elsewhere in EPOS.