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Get HyperTerminal running under Windows 7, 8, and 8.1

For those of you that have upgraded your system from XP (or earlier) you’ll discover one utility program missing from Windows.  HyperTerminal is no longer included with Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 as part of the operating system package.  Perhaps not as many people use it as in the old dial up modem days, but it is still a good utility for connecting directly to serial devices.  In particular many of the vintage robots that use a serial interface.  This article will explain how to get HyperTerminal working again.  Unlike some of the instructions you may find online this method is more thorough and once complete you’ll have HyperTerminal back just like it was in previous versions of Windows.

If you have a new system and don’t own an earlier version of Windows then you’ll need to purchase an old license for Windows XP that includes HyperTerminal before continuing.  Alternately you can purchase a new version of HyperTerminal from Higraeve here:  http://www.hilgraeve.com/hyperterminal/

To start you’ll need to retrieve some files from a backup of your XP system.

C:\Program Files\Windows NT\hypertrm.exe

C:\Windows\system32\hypertrm.dll

That is what most sites mention.  Now if you want the Help to work too then you need these files:

C:\Windows\help\hypertrm.chm

C:\Windows\help\hypertrm.hlp

Oh, and if you would like the icons to work then you also need this one:

C:\Windows\system32\hticons.dll

If you are running a 32-bit version of Windows then putting all of these files back in the same directory will give you a functional HyperTerminal.  64-bit versions of Windows should put those files in the 32-bit directories instead.  In some cases Windows 7 machines will run into issues with the UAC where you have to manually acknowledge that you want to run HyperTerminal (Still working on that)  There is still one more issue to resolve.  If you have custom settings for different devices (or robots in my case) then you will want to save them.  This is normally done with .ht files and if you have ones already defined then you’ll probably want to use them.  The trouble is that Windows doesn’t know what you want to do when clicking on a file with the .ht extension.  In earlier versions of Windows it was easy to define what program should open a new file type.   Not so in Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 since apparently a mere mortal user really shouldn’t be messing with those settings.  It was really annoying but there is a way around it!  You have to use the admin command prompt to manually create a new file type for a .ht file type and then manually associate that new .ht file type with the program to open it.

ASSOC .ht=htfile

FTYPE htfile=”C:\Program Files\Windows NT\hypertrm.exe” %1

Now when you double click on one of your saved settings with a .ht extension it will automatically start HyperTerminal with all the parameters you’ve saved.  Now, HyperTerminal will finally work as it really should under newer versions of Windows!