Marcel,

Most modern laptops comes with express card. An express card has to be able
to use PIC express and USB as well, most probably that card uses the USB for
the serial conversion as the easiest implementation.

http://www.expresscard.org/web/site/about.jsp

Tomas, If the device does not work contact with your supplier and ask help
or send/bring it back claiming back your money. From that money buy a
USB-Serial converter (hope you do not want to use that serial port for a JDM
style programmer or such weird applications, only for serial communication).

BTW, if you have higher standard note you should be able to get a docking
station for that - I am using the serial and the printer port that way for
my IBM/Lenovo laptop and works great (real RS232 with right signal levels).
But now I am just about to replace that with an older Dell desktop machine
that has 2 RS232 and a printer port, and will use it without screen attached
to it  -  with VNC I will be able to use that remotely from my laptop
hopefully with a crossover ethernet cable so that will be the development
station for all the microcontroller applications. Sometimes you can get a
very cheap old, used machine, maybe even cheaper than an express card.

Tamas



On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 9:32 PM, Marcel Birthelmer <marcel@carrietech.com>
wrote:

> Tomas,
> the ExpressCard connector has a USB channel in it I think, which is what
> lower-speed devices (serial adapters, card readers) tend to use. I
> recommend
> a PCMCIA card (if your laptop supports it) - those are guaranteed to be
> "proper" serial ports.
> - Marcel
>
> On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 1:24 PM, Tom=E1s =D3 h=C9ilidhe <toe@lavabit.com>=
 wrote:
>
> >
> > First I got myself one of those USB to RS232 adapters. Didn't work.
> >
> > Today I received my ExpressCard RS232 adapter. The god damn driver
> > doesn't work -- Windows keeps saying "The system cannot find the file
> > specified." and that's all. It shows up in Device Manager as "USB-Serial
> > Controller D"... which is awfully strange given that it's an ExpressCard
> > and so should have nothing at all to do with USB (I think?). Device
> > Manager gives the following "Device Id":
> >
> >    USB\VID_067B&PID_2303\5&37F53AEF&0&2
> >
> > It seems to think it's a Prolific USB to RS232 adapter.
> >
> > Anyone got any idea how I can get this working in Windows XP SP3?
> >
> > --
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> >
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