I’m looking for a modern laptop with a 9-pin (five on one side, four on the other) male serial port connection built-in. Not a monitor port (which has quite a few more pins) or a long printer port (which is, as I’ve said, quite a bit longer). What I want is a male port about a half-inch at its longest dimension.
I need to connect some old-but-useful hardware, and I can’t find anything but USB and FireWire in modern ads.
Rather than limit your laptop choices, consider a USB<->serial adapter. They are pretty inexpensive, and I’ve been told that they work well.
Thank you. I didn’t know anything of the sort existed. You may have saved me a lot of time and money.
(You know, the $4.95 I paid to post here just got repaid 100-1000 fold. :D)
The last new notebook I saw with an onboard 9 pin serial port was a 1.1 Ghz CPU Toshiba unit I sold about 2 years ago. I haven’t seen any since.
You can get USB to 9 pin serial adapters, but these are driver largely mediated, and may have bellyaches with some hardware devices that need to access the port on a very basic hardware level. PCMCIA/PCCARD to serial port interfaces (around 100 - 130) are more expensive, but are more generally compatible with serial interface hardware.
You can also get nice used, reasonably powerful notebooks on Ebay with 9 pin ports for less than $ 300.
well, my super-cool dell inspiron 4150 has a nine-pin serial port on the back! I couldn’t live without it, especially for my sharp personal organizer that I use to write when I’m on the bus. (dumb little thing, doesn’t do nearly as much as a true PDA but it’s got a great keyboard - big enough to type on easily with the two-thumb method, small enough to hold in my hands perfectly.)
Also use it for my blackberry pager… and I’ve been told that USB adapters don’t work so well, especially for those.
I hadn’t heard that serial ports were on their way out… that kinda sucks. (Are they still standard on new tower/desktop machines??) my inspiron is about two years old… I think I’ll go check at dell.com to see if the new models say anything about having serial ports or not.
(Also, this is really dumb, but I’ve got a chat program that lets you communicate between a palmpilot and a computer real-time over serial port. It doesn’t work the same over USB because you can’t talk to a USB port in the same way from visual basic - at least I never heard of how.)
I’ve found some of those adapters don’t work with some software.
Look into Dell or Sony laptops. Those will be your best bet.
I found a Compaq laptop at Best Buy for about $700 last year with a built in serial port.
Blech. Good riddance, I say! Yes, they are absolutely on their way out - on my 3.06GB Asus board, a header is provided on the motherboard to attach a serial port to the computer via expansion slot, but the board itself doesn’t have one. Aside from industrial applications, hobbist use and ancient Palms and organizers, no one uses them any more. Also on their way out:
Parallel ports
PS/2 ports
Note that the original Compaq iPaq was a “legacy-free” PC that had only USB ports on the back of the PC - no serial, PS/2 or parallel ports. While the original iPaq was a dismal failure, expect to see PCs like it very soon. Just look at printers - it’s nigh impossible these days to buy a printer for under $600 that even *has[/] a parallel port connector on the back. With serial ATA and PCI Express on the horizon, big changes are coming in the personal computer.
Yes, serial ports are dying. Never mind that there’s plenty of useful hardware that depends upon DS.9 connections, which used to be an industry standard (remember those?) and available on every home computer made.
It’s enough to make one believe in connector conspiracies all over again.
So, can I depend upon all laptop DS.9 connectors being male? With my luck, Dell’s will have gone female on me. The USB-to-2DS.9 connectors seem flaky to me, on further inspection, and they boil down to one more piece of equipment to break and/or lose.
Back in the Day the Ipaq’s weren’t going to be anything other than dummy terminals for running applications on the servers and were going to be sold as a whole company solution.
That Idea didn’t last long.
There is no, new shipping notebook witha DS9 connector - Period. Buy a used, refurbished notebook with a DS9 onboard, or get an adapter (PCCARD or USB Adapter) those are your choices. The DS9 connector gender on notebooks or from adapters will almost always be male. The PCCARD adapters provide for direct hardware serial UART controller access by connected devices, but they are pricey.
There’s bunch of these on Ebay (don’t confuse with PCCARD serial ATA adapters)
Dell is still shipping new notebooks with serial ports onboard. Check out the 300m, M60, Latitude D800, D505, or D600. The ones in the Latitude line actually aren’t that bad.
It is amazing how much hardware still needs or works best with a serial connection. I tried USB to Serial convertors but some hardware never worked right for me. I think my hardware/software was looking for an actually port and the USB emulation software didn’t fool it. Last year I purchased a Dell Inspiron 8200 which has all the ports you will find on a desktop but sadly thats been discontinued recently.
We beatcha to it! 
Most folks know that Macs ditched the floppy drive some time back, but around the same time, although less loudly talked about, the Mac platform ditched the DIN-9 Mac serial and the ADB (legacy Mac keyboard/mouse/etc bus) ports, and started giving the last rites to SCSI as well. My aging PowerBook is one of the last of the old breed.
The USB-to-legacyport adapters work pretty well in most cases.
And you say that like it’s a GOOD thing?? :eek:
I stand corrected, I was basing my comment on the numerous retail notebooks I have seen over the past year and not one had a serial port. I am quite literally stunned that Dell is currently shipping a machine with this ancient, beast embedded in it that is useless for the vast majority of users. I would have thought better of Dells design choices in optimizing notebook weght, size and functionality.
Yeah. Like USB and Firewire? Those are also “industry standards” you know.
And what sort of “useful hardware” runs from a serial port? Before you reply, I will concede the following:
External modems (still useful for folks that can’t get broadband)
Industrial applications (lots of machine tools, etc. are controlled by serial ports)
Newsrooms (“Professional” VTRs are still run by serial ports)
Hobbyist use (Easy to program, HAM\SW radio folks are into these, for one)
Ancient hardware (old HPCs like the Velo 1 use it. “Useful” is stretching it with these)
Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to call them “dummy terminals” - they came with a minimum Celeron 500 processor, Windows 2000, up to 128MB of RAM and a “Multi-Bay” that usually contained a CD-ROM drive, so they don’t really fit the definition of a “dummy terminal”. They had some decent PC specs at the time. However, they were indeed aimed at the corporate market… if you needed 100 easy-to-configure PCs for general office use, these were aimed at you.
GPS’s still use serial mostly (yes, there is the USB Earthmate and probably some others) NMEA 2.0 is 4800 baud! (has the NMEA come up with USB standards??)
Actually, tho Apple ditched the the serial port, it exists on thier rack mounted servers (for command-line management in case of network failure)
Brian
Practically every single disk array, network switch, network router, Unix server, unix workstation, storage network switch, remote controlled power switch, etc, that’s been built in the last 20 years has a console connection that’s in the form of a 9600 Baud terminal that you can connect to via a pc’s serial port.
Support people, especially, who are expected to go out into the field and run diagnostics on malfunctioning equipment, find things like db9 connectors on their laptops to be highly desirable, because they can just keep their debugging environment on the laptop and take it with them.
-lv
In my case, I really like my external modem. Don’t laugh: I can debug my connection attempts by watching the blinking lights. No internal modem can offer that. Plus, an external modem that hooks up to a DB.9 port will be usable by any OS I care to load on that machine. Granted, I probably won’t run DOS off the hard drive, but Plan 9 from Bell Labs is probably on the menu.
I could (probably) get by with a hardware internal modem. Not a winmodem, but a card inside the case with a full-featured Hayes-compatible system encoded into the hardware. I’d probably jump at the chance to buy a laptop with a good internal modem. But those seem to be rarer than DB.9 ports, so I’ll take the connector and keep my external modem.