AXE027 cable "cant find comport"

My AXE027 cable has been installed in my laptop on comport 3 & only on this comport, it has worked up until now.

I tried to program my picaxe chip and it was working, it then began to say it could not find comport 3 so I unplugged it then plugged it back in and tried again, this did not correct the error so I restarted my laptop and the error message is now saying it can't find comport 1. It has never been plugged into comport 1 so I can not for the life of me work out what the issue is.

Any help would be very much appreciated as this is the most rage inducing activity that I have ever experienced.

The COM port is allocated when you install the driver, which obviously worked as you have used the cable in the past. Note that Windows allocates a different COM port per USB socket, or in other words it is essential you always insert the cable into the same USB socket.

Within PE6 select File>Help and then click the Device Manger link. When correctly inserted into the original socket you should see the AXE027 appear as COM3. Nothing will work until Device Manager can see the AXE027 as a COM port.

When this is working select COM3 from the Workspace Explorer on the left hand side of PE6. You should then be able to program.