Some people have had an easy time installing this cable and others couldn't get it to work at all. Why is that?
Whether this cable works or doesn't work with particular drivers depends on the chip used in it. To find this out you have to connect the cable, go to Device Manager, right click on Properties, select the Details tab. Under Properties select Hardware IDs, then read what it says under Values. The cable I bought was USB\VID_058F&PID_9720. If you check the driver downloads from Sabrent they are good for an evidently much later version VID_067B&PID_2303, so the drivers from Sabrent's site won't work with the cable I bought. Since my inclination is to always download the latest drivers I wasted a lot of time on this!
If you have a cable with a later chip in it you may be OK. Or you may be OK with the drivers that come on the included CD. If none of these work you can try searching the net for drivers for the particular chip you have. The responsible thing for Sabrent to have done is to have all legacy drivers available on their web site.
After much wasted time I was finally able to get this cable to work. After a search I found the drivers in the download section at hiti dot com for a CS-320 card printer that uses the same kind of usb to serial controller. However, I was close to giving up so this cable (as many of the reviewers apparently did) so this cable came close to being absolutely useless to me. Installing a cable should be easier than this and for that I fault Sabrent for their lack of communication / transparency and as well for their non-support for older versions of their product. And that's why I gave this only two stars. Sabrent SBT-USC1M Hi-Speed USB 2.0 to Serial (9-pin) DB-9 RS-232 Adapter Cable (1-foot, Blue)
I bought this adapter as a test unit, and I've put it through its paces. I've tried it in Windows, Linux, and OS X. Modern Linux kernels detect the device with no user interaction.
OS X and Windows require a driver install. The adapter ships with a mini cd with Windows drivers. I didn't get a chance to test the driver disc. The packaging doesn't include instructions for downloading drivers online, but a quick Google search found the download site.
The device works well in all three operating systems. I rated four stars in compatibility because I had the device map to a different COM port in Windows a couple times, which made creating a saved connection a bit of a hassle. It's entirely possible this is a Windows quirk, and not the device/driver's fault.
Overall, I'm quite pleased.
The Sabrent SBT-USC1M worked flawlessly for us, but only after updating with a new driver v2.0.13.130 downloaded in file PL2303_Prolific_DriverInstaller_v110.zip (12/2/2009) from [...] -- the driver from the included mini-CD-ROM wasn't tested by us, because the disc had a fracture crack and couldn't be read by our CD reader. However, when we plugged it in, it enumerated with the same driver as the TRENDnet TU-S9, and operated perfectly with the downloaded Prolific driver. Our torture testing included self-loopback on an XP laptop, from COM1 (internal UART serial port) to COM14 (where our TRENDnet port showed up), sending a thousdand 1099-byte blocks at 115200bps from one program to another, which echoed the blocks back to the first program for comparison after short delay. [So, this is really "half-duplex" testing, but that's what we bought them for, so that's what we tested.]
I'll begin by saying that I've tried to be very patient with this product. I've been working for 6 months now trying to get this functioning through 2 different OS versions (XP and Win7).
The driver support for this (and I'm guessing for all of the Prolific based chips) is really, REALLY poor. You'll notice that even the "good" reviews here on Amazon are apologists for installing and re-installing drivers over and over again. There are hundreds of forum and blog postings on how to install the drivers and make this work. None of them are "foolproof". I've tried them all and still don't have a functioning unit. I've spent 100's of hours looking at Window's install logs, un-installing and re-installing different versions of the Prolific driver from both Prolific and Sabrent (I dare you to find a sensible versioning system there).
As a customer, I shouldn't need to uninstall and re-install, then manually attempt to fix the *.inf files and use pnputil.exe from the command line as an administrator to "really make sure" that the old inf's are removed. The drivers should recognize the hardware id's and install the correct drivers. The software should really work.
I could go on and on about this, but then I'd be wasting even more of my time on this.
If you love playing with Device Manager, un-installing drivers and re-instaling, watching Windows reboot over and over again, then this product is for you. If you value your time more than $0.25/hour, you will come out behind by purchasing this product. Spend the extra cash for a Serial-USB dongle that really works. - Serial Adapter - Usb Serial Adapter - Linux - Usb'
Detail Products
Detail Reviews
Click here for more information
