Re: USB serial ports

Various people claim they have gotten these USB-to-serial adapters to work. I couldn't, and many others have reported problems, too. USB is still an extremely flaky "standard" and many of the drivers written for USB devices are buggy. Whether these adapters will work with a particular computer & setup seems to depend on subtleties too fine for human comprehension, or maybe it's the phase of the moon that week. I finally solved my problem by going with a PCI-to-serial adapter card from SIIG. There's one that will give you two serial ports and one parallel port and it works pretty reliably, at least on my system. The PCI-ness of it solves that problem with IRQs and all that, but of course you need a free PCI slot. Caveat emptor.