Installation guide

56 Chapter 3

Using IO Configuration Utilities

Using IO Config

This section gives guidelines to use the IO Libraries configuration utility

IO Config. You can use IO Config to configure hardware interfaces (such as

an 82350A GPIB card, etc.) for use with VISA and SICL on a Windows 95,

Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, or Windows NT environment.

IO Config Requirements

The IO Config utility is used by the Agilent IO Libraries to configure

instrument I/O hardware interfaces. An interface must be configured with

IO Config before the interface can be used with the IO Libraries. You can

configure all available interfaces with IO Config for use with the Agilent IO

Libraries. With IO Config, you can also add, edit, or remove configuration

entries for the interface(s) you specify.

IO Config is an interactive program that searches your system for installed

interfaces that VISA and SICL support. You select the interface(s) you want

to configure and IO Config

selects default parameters required to configure

the interface(s).

You can run IO Config at any time. However, you must first install an

interface card in your system before you can configure the interface.

IO Config will verify that an interface card is installed before a configuration

entry will be added for the card.

You must have system administrator privileges on Windows 2000/NT to run

IO Config. You may also need to reboot the computer if you add or modify

interfaces with IO Config

to load or update driver files for specific interfaces

in the Windows kernel. IO Config will inform you if it is necessary to reboot

your computer.

When you configure VISA with IO Config, the default configuration is to

identify all VISA devices at application runtime. If you experience slow

performance when running VISA applications, you may want to edit the

VISA configuration to identify devices at configuration time (not at runtime).

See the VISA User’s Guide to edit the VISA configuration.

NOTE

If any VISA or SICL applications are running when changes are made

using IO Config, these changes will not take effect until all currently

executing applications have completed.