There has been a lot of talk about the absence of "real serial ports" on more recent laptops. Here is something I recently discovered and want to share with you all. Maybe you can benefit ...
Not to lang ago I received a HP Compaq 6710b laptop. On first sight there was no RS-232 output. With the laptop came a dockingstation and on that one I found 1 serial, 1 parallel, 1 DVI and 1 SVGA port (and several others). Connected the laptop to its dock and 'hey presto' one available active RS-232 port. Pure hardware, no BIOS or softwarechanges necessary. As a added bonus, with the dockingstation you can use 2 (large) external monitors at the same time. (even more space for your high definition P3-display). I didn't test the LPT-port, but expect it will work too. Same situation with my QRL-laptop, a Lenovo W500, without visible RS-232-port. Connected that one to an appropiate dockingstation; same trick same result, ..... nice. So, if you are a laptop user, check if you can dock. You can find dockingstations reasonably cheap on 'ebay'-like websites. 73 de PE8E, Ron. ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
