The couple of recent questions we’ve answered about PC resource issues have prompted many more (I fear there is a never ending supply of these types of PC questions). Here’s a typical one.
“I have a connection problem between my Roland keyboard, which has a built in serial port and my PC, which has two COM ports. The PC’s COM ports are 9-pin, but before I had an old 486 that had a 25-pin COM port. Now for some reason when I connect the special connection cord that I purchased at the time, which has it’s own DIN Plug in the back of the piano and a lead with a 9-pin at the Computer end (the supplied cord has a 25-pin but I have added an adapter to the 9-pin at the Computer end) and I start up my Power tracks or my Band-N-Box programs I have to go into Options and change to the Roland drivers that were supplied. At this point an error window pops up saying the COM Port is in use by another program. This happens for both COM 1 and COM 2. My modem is on COM 3 and my mouse has it’s own plug so doesn’t use a COM port so none of the COM ports are in use. Why can’t the Roland drivers see a clear COM port?”
Whew! If you made it through the question I hope you are ready for the answer. Actually it’s not that difficult, but it may require a little work to track down and correct the problem. COM ports and other Computer resources can be “in use” even when they don’t appear to be. This is dictated as much by software as anything. If you have a program that grabs control over one of your ports when running then that port will appear to be in use to other programs regardless of whether anything is actually connected to the port. There are many different types of programs that can grab resources without you specifically knowing it. Things like fax software and other Communications programs are notorious for this sort of thing. The simple remedy is to get rid of the offending program. You can do this using the Add/Remove Programs function. Or you can look in your Regedit and find the drivers for the application and remove them from there.
A common problem we see on both the Mac and PC is that people install enough stuff in their machines over a period of time that they eventually “break” something, and it usually involves a driver conflict. Sometimes the best, and easiest, fix is to just do a clean install and build the system up from scratch installing only what you know you need.