I talked with Larry Berg at Pfranc in October 2008 about buying his
USB to serial converter. Unfortunately, he no longer sells them. He
was unhappy because the manufacturer wouldn't support the drivers, and
didn't want his name associated with them anymore. He recommended any
adapter with the Prolific PC2303 or higher chip set, as long as it had
current XP or Vista drivers (he said that the drivers are the primary
source of trouble).

-John

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On Feb 24, 12:54 pm, wrote:
Hi Paul, I had trouble with easily-found USB-to-Serial interface
cables from Circuit City and BestBuy, trying to connect from a PC
laptop to my Volkslogger (a finicky piece of equipment), using
StrePla. One problem was Microsoft ActiveSynch, which does funny
things (I'm a techno-bozo and that's as good as the description
gets). If I disabled ActiveSynch, things generally went better (and
better yet when I was trying to load my IPAQ 3955 with Pocket StrePla,
but that's another thread).

The best serial adapter I've used is found athttp://www.pfranc.com/cgi-bin/P/USB_G4/garmin-GPS-cables; they also
make a bunch of different Garmin plugs for cabling. They have worked
for me, and several friends. I recommend them - I have no financial
interest (I'd like them to be around for a long time). They make 4
inch and 6 foot ones (handy to put laptop on wing if downloading from
the glider). On one laptop, I had to re-install drivers (available
from the same site athttp://www.pfranc.com/usb/usb.shtml#drivers)
before it worked.

You might want to search on your drivers, and update them - outside
chance it'd work. You might want to become a Pfranc too!

Dan