How to install the PortTalk driver permanently

This document describes how to install Craig Peacock's PortTalk driver under Windows XP.

Under Windows XP (etc), you may want run WxPic with a user account later. But to install the PortTalk driver, you need a administrator rights. The driver only needs to be installed once (with an admin account), but it can be used later with a user account.

More up-to-date information about PortTalk can be found on the PortTalk website (look for the chapter "Starting and installing the driver"). The following text describes how I (the author of WinPic) installed the PortTalk driver under Windows XP in November 2005.

Notes:

• If the steps shown below sound too complicated for you, run WxPic under Win XP with an administrator account. In that case, WxPic can install, start, and stop the PortTalk service automatically.
• Why run your PC without admin rights ? Because it's safer, especially if you frequently surf the net. With admin rights, a malicious software (or visitor) can do all sorts of things to your system, which you certainly don't want.

To install the PortTalk driver :

1. Boot your PC with administrator privileges
2. Copy the PORTTALK.SYS to your /system32/drivers directory.
3. Click on the PORTTALK.REG file to load the required registry keys.
   (for reference, the contents of PORTTALK.REG are listed in the appendix)
4. Reboot the computer (this time with a normal user account).
5. Start WxPic (with "I/O Port Access Driver" set to "use Port Talk").
   

If the PortTalk installation was successfull, WinPic can access your PIC programmer on the serial or parallel port now. If not, you will get an error messages like the following:

• PortTalk: No rights to access the SCM - try with admin rights
  which means, WxPic could not talk to the PortTalk driver, and tried to install that service itself through the Service Control Manager, which failed because you are not logged in with administrator rights. Try again to install PortTalk manually (as explained above) and check the registry entries this time.
• PortTalk: You do not have rights to the PortTalk service database
• PortTalk: The specified service name is invalid
• PortTalk: Driver does not exist. Installing driver.
  These three messages indicate that WxPic could communicate with the SCM, but the SCM could not open the PortTalk service for various reasons. Most likely, you didn't copy PORTTALK.SYS into the windows system directory.

If everything failed, don't despair ... use WxPic with admin rights. This is better than not being able to program PICs at all ;-)

Contents of PORTTALK.REG

PORTTALK.REG can be downloaded from the PortTalk website. It is basically a text file, which can be processed by the Windows Registry editor to add a few entries to the registry. It looked like this (in November 2005):

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\PortTalk]
"Type"=dword:00000001
"ErrorControl"=dword:00000001
"Start"=dword:00000002
"DisplayName"="PortTalk"

After double-clicking PORTTALK.REG, you can check if the contents are really copied into the windows registry (it will fail if you have no administrator rights). To check, open regedit, and look into
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE ... SYSTEM ... CurrentControlSet ... Services .

You should see at least the four subkey values which were added by PORTTALK.REG .

Links

• http://www.beyondlogic.org/porttalk/porttalk.htm is the PortTalk website, where you can download the PortTalk driver, its documentation, and the registry file PORTTALK.REG .