Cheryl: Are you saying you get no speech over the serial port? I've heard that the physical db9 port on the backplane of newer Thinkpads is now actually being assigned to the first serial device by default. But, perhaps this unit is setup along the lines of all older IBM Thinkpads, which default to the first serial device on the infra-red port. Because of their bios limitations, I believe you can only have one or the other, infra-red, or rs232c on the db9 port. Of course this can be changed in cmos. It can also be changed from DOS. Create a boot disk that boots DOSm, preferably with speech. You should have a directory called c:\thinkpad. If so, the following should fix you right up. Turn the following into a batch file and execute it. You will need to reboot for the changes to take effect, but this should get that db9 port working. @echo off c: cd c:\thinkpad\ ps2 serial on ps2 sera enable -- Janina Sajka, Director Technology Research and Development Governmental Relations Group American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) Email: janina at afb.net Phone: (202) 408-8175 Chair, Accessibility SIG Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF) http://www.openebook.org