Siemens Drive Monitor?

[Ritchie200]

Just bought a USB to serial cable from Gigaware.  It came with the driver disk for the cable and also a disk from Siemens called Drive Monitor 5.5.  There is nothing in the documentation that even mentions it.  I have looked all over online and I can not find out what the heck it does!  The Siemens website is an absolute disaster!!!!  Does anyone have any idea?  I did find drive monitor software ads that supposedly monitor your computer drives and is supposed to alert you when your drive is about to smoke.  I just can not imagine Siemens would even mess with something like this.

Jim

[PRR]

My rule for ANY software: if you don't know why you NEED it, don't install it.

Do you need it?

A serial port on the end of a USB cable needs a driver to tell the system that what looks like a USB port has a "serial" on the end. (This probably should be built-in on modern O/Ses, but...)

> I have looked all over online and I can not find out what the heck it does! 

Google "Drive Monitor 5.5". First two (non-AD) links give hints.
http://support.automation.siemens.com/WW/llisapi.dll?func=cslib.csinfo&objId=11769381&nodeid0=10804984&load=content&lang=en&siteid=cseus&aktprim=0&objaction=csview&extranet=standard&viewreg=WW
http://www.industry.usa.siemens.com/drives/us/en/electric-drives/maturing-siemens-drives/masterdrives-from-siemens-industry/downloads/pages/downloads.aspx

Apparently some Siemens industrial gear is pre-configured or commissioned through a serial port. Since today's tech laptop lacks a serial port, Siemens sells the USB thingie. Thinking you might be commissioning some Siemens factory controller (since you bought Siemens USB/serial thingie; otherwise you'd buy Rosewill, Sabrent, StarTech, Kingwin, Aten, TripLite, or other minor-league brand), they throw-in the factory controller application (hey, costs them zero).

You don't need it, don't want it, ignore it.

[Ritchie200]

I agree with that rule 110%!  However, I am still having compatibility(?) issues with the piece of equipment it is connected to (non-Siemens).  I was thinking that maybe this program is the solution.  Yeah, those two links were to spec pages that mean nothing to me - and I was all over the Siemens site.  Nothing on the site says, "Hey! Our new Drive Monitor 5.5 helps you communicate with a red left handed smoke shifter!"  The only other programs with a similar name in my search supposedly monitor your hard drives.  I guess Gigaware has some sort of working relationship with Siemens and like you said, the old laptops had serial ports that the new laptops do not have.  It just seemed like an odd addition to the main driver software for the general public.

Thanks PRR

[Ritchie200]

Yeah, a place I used to work had some huge ancient Cincinnati horizontal mills that had been converted to CNC.  Yup, all pascal programming on a bunch of old 8088 controls from the 70's.  Used to be tape controlled and then "upgraded" with some memory - that was so limited we had to drip the programs on the run.  There were only (supposedly) three companies in the US that can work on them.  It would have been too expensive to upgrade so they just kept patching and making chips.  These things were metal hogs and, like most of the old equipment from the US machine tool golden age, built like brick outhouses.  It was amazing they could hold the tight tolerances that they did considering how old they were.

Thanks!
Jim