any advice on better choice?

[Arthur Alchin]

I have sent questions all around the planet and still haven't arrived at the best conclusion to my problem

I have a Sony VAIO (3 months old) that has the lovely VISTA on it (sorry, I had no choice): the laptop has no rs232 ports and am trying to coax the USB ->rs232 convertor to play the game so that i can run the LXD75 autostar mount.

Of course the drivers don't seem to exist for the convertor so i tossing around the idea of using a PCMCIA RS232 card, although these appear to be expensive.

Has anybody any suggestions on the topic? I think half of everybodies problems is the lack of vista drivers.

[Dennis]

Hi Arthur

This is not a direct answer to your question, more a summary of my experience.

I have found a Socket IO RS232 PCMCIA (http://www.socketmobile.com/products/device-connectivity/serial/)card on my 4 year old IBM ThinkPad (Win XP Pro SP2) to be very reliable and it has proven to be completely stable and reliable, compared to a couple of USB to RS232 dongles I had previously tried.

Cheers

Dennis

[acropolite]

Might be easier to can vista and run XPro until the rest of the world catches up.

[rogerg]

The only comment I can add, is that if you get a PCMCIA one, if at all possible make sure it has a slim exterior such that you can put both it and another PCMCIA in at the same time....

I have 2 PCMCIA slots on my laptop, but both the cards I use (wirless & USB2) extend upwards. So I can't put both in at the same time. Hard to explain sorry.

I could have instead, if I knew about the problem before, bought a USB PCMCIA card which instead of having the ports directly on it, had a thin cable coming off that then split in to the ports. This would have allowed me to fit both cards in at the same time. I suspect the same choices would be available for RS232.

Happy to provide photo's sometime in the next couple of days if you don't understand my ramblings..

Roger.

[ballaratdragons]

I agree with Phil. Uninstall Vista and use XP. Lots of people are uninstalling Vista off their new machines and installing XP.