Issues With USB Com Port!

[Mark Griffin]

Good Morning,
I am an amateur radio operator. I have a device that connects to a USB port. But for some oddball reason it is now showing up under USB Serial Converter with the prolific chip set driver. Before it was using a com port of 9. This change has now made the device useless to me. How do I change it back to where it was? It seems that every time Microsoft comes up with a major change to it's software it screws things up with my com ports. Please HELP!!!! Mark Griffin, KB3Z

 

[Bighorn]

More of an observation than a solution. I haven't worked with many computers of the last several years that still have the built-in 9-pin and 25-pin comm ports that were common with WinXP and earlier computers. All I have seen have been upgraded with later versions of Windows, I have a WinXP computer in my storage shed with 3.5" and 5.25" floppy disk drives and a 250MB Zip drive, useful when clients want data from those old disks.

As technology has progressed some things have simply been shoved aside as they become less popular/useful. I'd be looking at places like www.cyberguys.com or Amazon for an add-in card that can provide the old-style ports. I don't think it's by design but USB devices can be problematic in that they change things up when plugged in, especially in that all USB ports are identified differently by Windows and that changes how Windows works with those devices.

EDIT: Windows gets the credit/blame, as do all Operating Systems, for identifying onboard devices when reading the BIOS on the motherboard. I've not yet seen a BIOS that includes boot support for USB 3.0 ports, that's usually provided by the OS after it loads so one has to use the USB 2.0 ports for more basic things. And not all USB 3.0 devices will reliably "fall back" to work in USB 2.0 ports.