We are running a survey to help us improve the experience for all of our members. If you see the survey appear, please take the time to tell us about your experience if you can.
Hello together,
I have a problem with my dongle. I have new PC and there is no printer port any more, so I can't put in the sentinel. So I used an USB to parallel cable to insert our dongle, after that I installed the Sentinel Protection Installer V7 and executed the program. After that I also got the same error message as before. When I configure the sentinel about SetupSysDriver.exe, I have no chance to configure it, because there were two options ISA and USB and no change has influence on the error in µVision. So does anyone has an idea to solve the problem?
Thanks
Thommy
Note that the LPT dongles would work much better if they where implemented as an ECP/EPP-compatible printer.
Most dongle designs are from before the ECP/EPP standard.
And not only that - the dongles are implemented to be transparent, to allow you to place a printer behind the dongle. Until Windows 98 and ME, you could play directly with the I/O hardware in the PC. From Win NT, Win 2k and forward, a program can no longer touch the hardware but must have a driver as intermediary.
A ISA or PCI-connected (including PCI-E, Cardbus, ...) printer port should have the hardware capabilities needed for a dongle. But a modern PC operating system do not allow software to do dirty tricks with the hardware. Adding a PCI board with a printer port will make the PC hardware able to support the lock - it will not automatically let a new OS be compatible with a program written for an older OS.
Because of this, the larger hw lock companies (Hasp et al) have since long sold newer lock technologies that are compatible with todays PC hardware and compatible with todays operating systems.
A USB-based HW lock that looks like some standard two-way device (such as a serial port that echoes back the received data after encryption) can use standard PC drivers, and will work even with "tomorrows" operating systems.
A system that abuses the hardware to do something it wasn't designed for is more-or-less doomed to not be future-proof. Such a design would require a huge market share for OS vendors to care about them.