USB to serial adaptor.

That's how the MS does it with the exception of the injector drivers which are PWM anyway.

I know - but I've seen the slots around on laptops long after they'd stopped putting real serial ports on them in favour of USB. I just wasn't sure if they were still around (this laptop's from 2003 and has one such slot - but no useful serial port and three USB ports instead*)

• grumble. Took me a while to find a _good_ widget so I could use a PS/2 keyboard via one of the USB ports.

cheers

Jules

There are PCMCIA cards which do serial - but a lot more expensive than a lead.

Here's one for £18.70 off ebay from a UK seller with no apparent recent negative or neutral feedback:

seems reasonable, but shorter ebay URLs are easier, e.g.

Your point is?

More to the point, PCMCIA is not PCI, either.

MBQ

That's CardBus or PCMCIA 5.0, i.e. a totally different bus interface to normal PCMCIA.

PCMCIA Type II allowed for I/O as well as memory to be connected.

MBQ

Time vs. money, I suppose. *If* it just does serial by appearing as a real serial port with a standard IC on the system's bus with no drivers needed, I think I'd pay extra for it (but I have no idea if they do work like that).

Aside from the initial faff with leads, with a USB solution I'd never be sure that it'd do the job with any hardware I threw at it later, or after an OS upgrade, or if I changed the laptop etc.; I don't want it to just work now with a particular combination of stuff, but with anything I might throw ia it in the future, too.

(I avoid data CDs and DVDs for the same reason - like USB it seems to be another technology where there's an awful lot of incompatibility around and liberal interpretation of specs :-)

cheers

Jules

But wouldn't that also apply to PCMCIA cards?

Eh? I've never had a problem with data CDs and DVDs - they're easy.

The biggest grumble I have with USB serial leads is that they are wont to change their COM port number almost at random. Perhaps it depends which USB port it plugs into, or the pahses of the moon, who knows.

One day, it's COM3 the next day it's COM5 or COM7 etc etc.

This screws up pre-defined profiles in TTY apps like PuTTY, where you set up a profile for a particular device, and the profile will include the COM port to use.

At least 'proper' UARTS stay put.

The FTDI drivers for XP don't seem to suffer from this, mine is always named COM1: regardless of when/where it is plugged in.

Ah.

Same with the two apps I bought it for. At the moment it's always appeared as COM3. But I'll now know where to look if it doesn't work, thanks.

Well, my experience has been that anything which claims to need an RS232 connection will work with one of the humble old serial chips (8250,

I've seen plenty of cases where the media goes bad over time, or a drive is fussy about which vendor's media it will talk to, or a disc might appear fine with one drive, but had actually deteriorated or been damaged in some way where another drive won't won't read it. Not to mention drives with buggy firmware which don't play nicely alongside other devices, although those do seem a lot rarer than they once were.

I'd just rather not have anything important on optical media and come to want to read it in a few years, only to find that none of the drives I can get hold of at the time will read it.

cheers

Jules

I've had nothing BUT trouble with optical media

Down to the point where I have a variety of optical drives on different machines that I can cross-mount to install stuff off them if I need to.

Then I discovered that you cant use a linux type filesytem on them, so at best I could write one tar file.

Then i discovered that one tar file was too big.. then I discovered Id spent nearly as much on all those trashed optical disks as....

...My backup strategy is simple now. Two hard disks, one server and rdiff.

If one disk goes, I will buy another. Endlessly.

Optical media sucks big time.

Why would you want to? You use the CD file system. And put lots of files on. Even Linux understands the CD file system.

I find with USB you have to use the same port everytime for the same item, at minimum it re-loads drivers, at worst it changes the com port numbers as well. Mine currently go up to com53.

Some converters allow you specify a port number in Windows Control Panel, and stick to it. But it's hard to find whether not that feature exists before you install the driver.

I needed that feature for Philips Pronto-Edit software, which scanned ports automatically from COM1 upwards looking for the device (good) but gave up when it reached a non-existent port (harrumph).

One of the oversights in the design of NT seems to be a lack of a proper way of enumerating the serial ports. There are multiple ways of doing it, and no one on its own seems capable of dealing with all circumstances!