Laptops With Serial Port

[borris-bear]

Anyone know of any Laptop manufacturers that still put a serial port on their laptops seems increasingly hard to find one.

Acers solution was to buy a docking station - kind of defeats the point of having a laptop to configure switches, firewalls etc.

If not anyone use a serial to usb converter? does it work?

thanks

[Podie]

Dell D600 next to me has one... not sure about the D610, but I'll check.

[Podie]

D610 has a serial port too.

[robbieduncan]

borris-bear said:

If not anyone use a serial to usb converter? does it work?

I used a Keyspan one with my PowerBook to update my GPS for a few years. Works fine.

[aldi]

I know someone using a Belkin usb-=>serial to interface with PLC's, works well.

[plasticpig]

USB-->Serial dosent always work. A better bet is to get a PCMCIA serial card.

[arcturus]

We've had no problems with the USB to Serial converters we sell in our shop. They are branded 'Newlink'.

[jimmyjimjim]

arcturus said:

We've had no problems with the USB to Serial converters we sell in our shop. They are branded 'Newlink'.

We've had one problem - the targus usb to serial converters we use (and most others) do not provide a particular pin or signal (I think it might have been earth, but I'm not certain) that some ports require to recognise that there is a connection present. This stuffed us completely on talking to one of our product lines (fortunately now discontinued so the problem doesn't occur often).

[Philbes]

USB to Serial converters only support lines 2,3,7 - the data lines. Hardware handshake on 4,5,6,8,20 are not supported. Signals on these lines are required by many software applications and hardware devices.
The line numbers stated are for a 25-pin connector as I can't remember the line no.s for the more modern 9-pin connector. I'm getting old.