No communications port open on this PC

Hi.

I'm having issues trying to connect to my timeclock to pull punches, to do payroll for my business. But this issue keeps cropping up. The timeclock connects directly through an ethernet port. I only have one ethernet port on this PC. My internet is through wifi. I had the same issue last week. But it magically resolved itself. I have no idea what I did to fix it last week. I tried everything I could think of and repeated the same steps from last week. But still nothing. My computer is a dell inspiron 3670. I've had it for a few years and this is the only issue of note, I've ever encountered with it. I tried contacting the software publisher Pyramid timesystems. But they dont know what's wrong either. Dell has been no help at all.

Please help me asap! I have to do payroll by 3am est tonight.

Thank You.

I did reboot on both. Cable should be fine. It's brand new outdoor rated. What manual IP should I use? The timeclock downstairs has the 169.254.238.36 IP declared on it's screen.

There is no router involved between the PC and the timeclock. The timeclock connects directly to the PC through a 100ft long ethernet cable. Commercial/Industrial grade. The PC only connects to internet through wifi. Should I plug the timeclock into the router and the pc into the router too to see if that works? I dont want to break something more.

I think the problem is the metric. One network adapter (your Wi-Fi) is the first metric and the time clock is the second metric. Thus only the Wi-Fi will work. SO the solution may be that the time clock does need to be plugged into the router that way it's on the same LAN as the Wi-Fi.


I'd make sure your network in the PC is set as private and not public as well.

How to Change Windows 10 Network to Private

It also looks like this may be a TCP over serial connection due to the screenshot showing a COM port being used. If that's the case then go into Device Manager and look in the COM ports and either change the COM port or delete the COM port and restart. Hopefully the Time software will reestablish the communications port.

COM ports can be a real pain sometimes. In synopsis, get that time clock on your Wi-Fi LAN via the router and hopefully the COM port won't fail next time.

I'm not there otherwise I could probably solve this.

Edit-

There's this as well. How to Reset Network Settings in Windows 10

Solved.

I must have both the PC and the Timeclock connected physically through the router with an ethernet cable.

Having the pc connect through wifi, and the timeclock through the router, does not work.

A physical ethernet connection from both the pc and the timeclock is required, and solves the issue.

However, The PC connected directly to the timeclock does not work. But it did work for many years before. I do not know what's changed. I guess it must've been a windows update or something(Yet another reason to detest modern windows).

I ran some tests and; Windows 8.1 does not work either through a direct connection. It requires a router intermediary. But my personal windows 7 desktop machine; my daily driver, does works flawlessly connected to the timeclock directly through ethernet. Even in VM mode when it's emulating XP, I was able to pick up the timeclock through direct ethernet connection.

The Windows 7 machine may have an auto MDI-X NIC...