A big THUMBS DOWN to Nat'l Instruments

[precaud]

... for removing from their website all but their current driver version which supports their current-production 488-2 card(s).

    

Now, if you want to use an older card, you have to "reach out" to NI Support and request the specific driver version for it.
This sux bigtime.

[coppercone2]

lol.

2gb of server space saved?

[precaud]

If that... earlier versions were not resource hogs

[coppercone2]

If that... earlier versions were not resource hogs

glad I never had luck with GPIB cards

[RoGeorge]

http://sine.ni.com/psp/app/doc/p/id/psp-356
and if you click the VIEW ALL for drivers section
http://search.ni.com/nisearch/app/main/p/ap/tech/lang/ro/pg/1/sn/ssnav:ndr/aq/AND(nicontenttype:driver,%20sitesection:ndr,%20AND%20(OR(nigen10:785,%20productcategories:785,%20%22NI-488.2%22)%20,%20OR(nilanguage:ro,%20nilanguage:en)))/

What exactly do you need but couldn't find?

[precaud]

What exactly do you need but couldn't find?

Nothing. I archived the earlier versions long ago. They used to have a really informative, easy-to-use chart showing all their cards, the OS's they could be used with, and links to the drivers in the matrix. The "view all" link shows some of their drivers but its not organized by card. The change is clearly to discourage use of the old cards. But who in their right mind is going to buy, for instance, a new PCI-GPIB card for $819 ?

[precaud]

Here's an example. I'm trying to locate, download and install drivers for the PCI-GPIB board.
This link  http://www.ni.com/product-documentation/5326/en/
says that versions 2.0 to 15.5 are compatible with XP.
This one   http://www.ni.com/product-documentation/5458/en/
says that versions 3.0 to 17.6 are compatible with the card.

That suggests that anything from ver 3.0 to 15.5 will work.

But its not so. 15.5 is for Mac.

After some searching, the correct driver is ver 2.7.3 but it is not even on the list. And not on the website.

Like I said, I think they have purposely screwed it up for the earlier boards.



They have done this intentionally

[precaud]

There's more than one way to skin a cat. NI maintains an FTP site. Here's the link to the GPIB drivers index page for numerous OS's.

ftp://ftp.ni.com/support/gpib/

The latest version for the PCI-GPIB for XP is 2.52 . It's there in the folder named "ni488225".

[jmelson]

glad I never had luck with GPIB cards

Well, the hysterical thing is you can make a VERY decent GPIB interface with a bidirectional parallel port on a PC, and about 50 lines of C code.
It just takes a bunch of wires to map the pinout.
Now, if you need to transfer megabytes/second, a real GPIB interface can do better, but most GPIB instruments can't send/receive at that rate, anyway.

Jon