I have an Acer Travelmate 8200 notebook with Windows 7. The notebook has a built-in IrDA Fast Infrared Port (on the front panel) which is activated in the BIOS. Windows did auto-detect the IrDA port and automatically installed WHCQ-signed drivers for it and shows it as working: Device manager lists it as "IrDA Fast Infrared Port" under the Category "Infrared devices".
The IrDA FIR port hardware comes from National Semiconductor (Hardware ID: NSC6001), this company is also listed as the driver author. However, the company now seems to be part of Texas Instruments.
Now the question: Just how do I read Infrared signals with this correctly installed device?
I tried WinLIRC (http://winlirc.sourceforge.net/), but it can't find the device. And also the question and answer How to use IrDA adapter as serial port? here on Superuser did not help me - the guy there seems to look only for a driver, which I have already, while I seem to look for a tool to access the driver, I believe. It seems I need to map the device to a Serial port to make it work for WinLIRC, but how would I do so? I already tried creating a serial port manually in the Device manager and set the I/O addresses to the IR port, which did not work.
On the Asus support website for this notebook I did not find any software related to the infrared port. The port is listed in the manual as a feature, however, so there must somehow be a possibility to access it.
I also tried IrCOMM2k driver (http://www.ircomm2k.de/English/index.html), which seems not compatible to Windows Vista and above. It installs without errors, but it does not do anything (also the config panel in the device manager is not showing up).