about dongles and USB ports

[dolph2003]

Ok. So here I am with Lightwave 7.5 in the box still, and me waiting for the arrival of my Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop to host Lightwave and quite a few other 2D and Video editing programs. This is a good time for me to ask about "dongles" with which I have no experience. I have a USB dongle and was wondering if that has to stay attached all the time to one of the two USB ports on my laptop, or does it just have to be attached when I'm running LW? Also, does the dongle have to be hooked up directly to the laptop, or can it be attached via a USB hub? If it does have to be attached all the time, or directly to the labtop, do other folks simply use a hub to have enough USB ports for all their other USB stuff. For example, I typically use at least a graphics tablet or a mouse, a printer, a scanner and a flash memory card reader or other storage device at the same time. I'm open for advice and/or recommendations for these questions or anything else that someone thinks I should know.:rolleyes:

[Heimhenge]

The dongle needs to be attached all the time or LW will not run. It works through a hub same as direct. Further, you need an active parallel port (even f the dongle is USB) for it to be recognized by LW. This seems weird, but that's the way it is. The dongle does not mind sharing the hub with other devices.

[dolph2003]

So, I have to have the dongle sticking onto my laptop even during transport? Or, do I simply need to have the dongle on the computer anytime it is turned on? I suppose that would not be too bad even though I will rarely use Lightwave during my work day; I'm a high school teacher. By active parallel port, does that mean my computer simply has to have a parallel port, or do I actually have to have a device using the parallel port? I don't have anything that I hook up by parallel port. What do other folks with laptops do?

[Heimhenge]

You only need the dongle plugged in if you intend to run LW. If your laptop has a parallel port, and you have not deactivated it via BIOS, you should be ok. You don't need anything actually using the parallel port.

[Bytehawk]

if you are a lot on the road and need to take your LW dongle and other dongles with you I would seriously consider some form of assurance in case of theft, loss or damage

anyone has had any bad experience with 'lost' or damaged dongles ?

[dolph2003]

Thanks for your input. Sounds like I'm in good shape. My new laptop does have a parallel port along with a couple of USB ports. I'm going to get a 4-port mini hub so I can hook up all my extras including the dongle when using LW. And yes, as a teacher, laptop will travel every day, so I already have to deal with keeping everything protected and secure. I can't wait to dive into LW. I'm ultimately wanting to be able to create animated 3D content related to science and math. There is not much out there for high school students that both educates and is a kick to work with. For example, I'm considering what immunology meets sci-fi adventure could look like.

[Lamont]

What you can do is launch Lightwave and remove the dongle after the application has started. It just needs to be there when it boots up.

If you loose or break your dongle, it's 200 bucks to replace it.

[duderender]

anyone has had any bad experience with 'lost' or damaged dongles ?

From my 3ds Max days, it was a "handling" charge like $200 to get a replacement.

[mrunion]

Don't know how true this is, but I read somewhere of USB hub's "killing" the sentinal dongle. It seems that wherever I read it (think it was the "old" NewTek forums), there were a few people that had experienced this problem.

I would plug the LW dongle into the laptop itself and run the other stuff off the hub.

[Dodgy]

I don't have a parallel port on my home pc and my USB dongle works fine... Seems they've got that problem sorted, not sure that this wasn't an urban myth ?

I take my dongle between home and work fine, I plug it into the back of my MS keyboard at work, and that works fine and into a hub or directly into the pc, and that works fine too.

The home pc is a Shuttle Athlon Nforce2 BTW...

[Heimhenge]

Dodgy: no urban myth here. I tried it A/B. Parallel port enabled and disabled in BIOS did indeed affect the dongle's being recognized. Talked to NT about it, and we agreed it was legacy code from back in the parallel port dongle days. Perhaps that code has been removed from the latest Sentinal drivers. Must be if yours works w/o a parallel port. Or ...

Could it be your machine lacks a physical parallel port, but still has a logical port enabled in BIOS? Not sure if that's possible, as I've never owned a machine w/o a parallel port.