Why is there a 1 LPT limit for testing?

[Comark Corp]

Some of our systems have more than 1 parallel port - is there any reason why Burnin test pro does not support this?

Thanks.

[David (PassMark)]

There is no good reason, but here are some bad ones

1) 99.9% of PCs have 1 or less parallel ports
2) The parallel port is dead. USB has replaced it.
3) A device driver is required to access the Parallel port. Device drivers are already complex enough for us to debug without adding multiple threads
4) No one has ever asked for this feature (until now).

There is no technical reason why it couldn't be done however.

------
David

[Comark Corp]

Thank you David. Most of our computers are deployed in the embedded and factory automation markets, where having more than one parallel port is rather common; in fact many of them also have 4 or more serial ports. Is there any chance that support for more than one port could be added?

Thank you.

[David (PassMark)]

Four or more serial ports is no problem. BurnInTest supports 64 simultaneous serial ports. This is because PCs with 2 or more serial ports were very common a few years ago and we needed to support this.

We have no plans to add support for simultaneous testing of more than 1 parallel port. It would be a significant amount of work for a feature that almost no one would use.

My advice would be to write a script in BurnInTest, to test each parallel port in a sequential manner, rather than simultaneously.

-----
David