Installing the Infrared adaptor:

Installing peripheral devices in both Win2000 and XP is considerably easier than with previous version of Windows.

That was certainly the case when I installed my old Parallax Research 'LiteLink' (aka PRA9500A) serial port device.  It installed straight away and started working without even needing a re-boot.

Just go to the Add/Remove Hardware Wizard in the Control Panel, tell it that you want to install an Infrared device...

Select the device you want to install and 'bingo': Windows 2000/XP should have it up and running straight away!...

In fact, may newer devices (e.g. I also have an ACTiSYS IR2000U USB adaptor) are even easier and effectively just need to be plugged in for the machine to recognize them and fire up the drivers (or at least ask for manufacturers driver disk/CD to be inserted so it can go look for them).

The good news bit:

The reason that you can be sure that it's working straight away is because - if you've got plBeam installed on your EPOC machine (see my explanation of this here) - then you can immediately start using this to send files back and forth over infrared.

As soon as you try to send a file using plBeam, you get the IR icon appearing on your Windows desktop as before:  - and Windows asks you if you want to accept the file.

And the little IR icon appears in your System tray:- 

And of course you can beam back to your EPOC machine from Windows too...

The even better news bit:

...is that a chap called Jan Kiszka has been working on upgrading his IrCOMM2k driver software to support PsiWin. His previous version (v1.x.x) didn't work with it but he already has an alpha release of v2 on his website (http://www.ircomm2k.de/ - in both German and English) where he discusses his progress. At the time of writing, v2.0.0 alpha7 is available for download (look on the 'Downloads' page) and I can confirm that this works with PsiWin on both Win2000 and WinXP machines. Yay!

The installation is fairly manual at this stage (the 'setup' program will be added in beta1 !) and so you need to read through the instructions carefully as you install - but it does work so persevere. I would also suggest that you read my notes on the other pages on using a virtual COM port with PsiWin so that you can understand what's going on... NB: The new COM port installs but describes itself in German (this is an alpha release after all <grin>) - however it works fine.

PsiWin sometimes gets a little confused if you try to switch from an IR connection to a serial cable connection on the fly (or visa versa) but restarting PsiWin seems to sort it out usually. And I have to report that on both my work Win2000 machine (an IBM ThinkPad T23 running at 1.1Ghz with 128Mb RAM) and my home WinXP machine (an Athlon 1600+ with 512Mb RAM) it is extremely stable! PsiWin would quite happily copy and convert multiple files between PC and Psion...

Some hints'n'tips:

• Make sure that you've got the new virtual COM port selected under PsiWin (you find out which COM port number it is by looking in your Hardware Manager).
• You'll probably have to hit 'Connect' under the PsiWin icon a few times to get the initial link when you've started Windows.  This because Windows initially assumes it's a standard Microsoft IrDA link and this has to time out before IrCOMM2k can kick in and link with PsiWin.
• More to follow...