20 Sep
2004
20 Sep
'04
12:44 a.m.
At 11:44 PM 9/19/2004, Roger Merchberger wrote:
I recently tried a Belkin USB-to-serial and a second brand (Amb-something)
on my Win2000 box in hopes of delivering an extra serial port for
my old Palm III. No go! Both blue-screened when Palm Desktop
tried to access the serial port. I suspect that either my motherboard
USB is blown or the drivers didn't like a dual-processor machine.
There are PCMCIA to serial adapters, no? And we'll be able to
insert PCI serial cards as long as PCI is around.
But I'd love to have a USB-to-floppy connection, too. And we'd all
love it if it was 8", 5 1/4", 3 1/2" and 2" compatible. :-)
- John
The serial port
_is_ disappearing. I am concerned. [...]
USB-to-serial dongles are
_not_ a seamless solution. The two arenas this is cropping up are
modern Macs and modern laptops. While these devices are not covered
under the 10-year umbrella, they will be at some point, and when they
are, they will _not_ have native serial ports and there will be many
things that we do with ease now, with 5-year-old machines that we be
hard five years from now.
Some are better than others, but you are right - they are rarely a "seamless"
solution by any means. I have a belkin adapter that so far has done everything I ask of it
- Winders & Linux.