USB to RS232 - USB Converter Cable

Bought this cable, and the little CD that came with it clearly assumed a greater level of knowledge than I possessed! I was lost and couldn't install a driver for it. Then I found the link to the seller (Aquarius Computers) and an invitation to contact via a contact form. This was 2.30pm on a Saturday, and by 4pm same day I had a reply pointing me at a site to directly download the driver, which was straightforward to install. Everything working smoothly now.If you have the same problem (I have XP and using the cable to run an external modem) Google "PL-2303 Software and Drivers" (include the double quotes) and choose the link ending ID=31. There, on the Prolific Technology Inc. site, you will find a file to download called wd_pl2303_v20019v2028.zip. Caters for Win98SE/ME and Win2K/XP/2003.

My Digihome DG250DTRA08 box stopped working, it just displayed FAIL on the LCD display, this happened after a brief power cut.So here is how I fixed it.The lead took a couple of weeks to arrive from China but at this price I'm not complaining. Got sent the blue one with with silver cable with a mini drivers CD.Running Windows 7 64bit I expected a few driver problems, so ignoring the CD I plugged it in and let Windows update work its magic, although it took quite a few minutes all of a sudden I had a COM4 port appear in device manager. Windows update is amazing now days for most devices compared to Win98 days when it couldn't even find a driver for a simple mouse I plugged it.I had previously found and downloaded the firmware for my Freeview recorder box and instructions on how to upgrade or reinstall it. Problem is they referred to using Hyper Terminal which isn't included in Windows 7, there are alternative terminal programs but I didn't want to complicate things, Thankfully I had a Windows XP virtual machine on hand which I copied the two files from needed to run Hyper Terminal,The next step was simply a case of connecting the leads, powering the Freeview box on, select the correct port settings in Terminal and connecting. Then select send file, browse and select the firmware file to send. The bit that caught me out first time was after hitting send you have to power the box off at the wall and back on again before the send file process times out! After the firmware has finished sending power off the box again and hopefully it will be working.This worked for me, box fixed and all my saved recording were still there, well worth the risk of £2.25 for a lead and 20-30 minutes spare time.Hope this helps someone

I bought this to interface to an X10 controller for Home Automation. I first installed it on my Windows 7 main machine to test it out, but despite both loading (Win7) drivers from the included CD-ROM and downloading ones from the Prolific Technology website, I could not get it to work. Device manager reported an "Error 10", failure to start.However when I installed it into my home automation laptop which runs XP and using the (XP) drivers on the included CD-ROM, it reported no problems and the serial link to the X10 controller works great. So I guess it's either the drivers are not mature for Windows 7 yet, or the chipset is a counterfeit copy (as suggested by the Prolific Technology website when Error 10s are encountered).

I needed this to allow me to do a software update on a HUMAX 9200T PVR from a PC running Windows Vista. I already had the appropriate RS232 serial cable that I'd used on an older computer that had an RS232 connection.The new converter cable came with a mini-CD and absolutely no paper instructions. The CD had no obvious instruction manual on it - just a series of folders with different setup programs in them but no information as to what was what.I plugged in the cable and Vista detected new hardware and offered to look for the required driver. It couldn't find it on the Internet and also couldn't find it on the supplied CD.In Device manager the new device showed up as needing a device driver. After Googling for the name of the device that was showing up in Device Manager I came across someone that mentioned a driver that included the number 340 in it's name. There was a link to a website that had driver software that this person said worked fine for them.However, I noticed that the CD that came with the new cable had a folder named R340 with a file in there named HL-340.exe so I ... unplugged the cable ... restarted the computer ... ran the R340\HL-340.exe ... inserted the cable ... and Device Manager then showed a working USB-Serial CH340 COM port.It was easy enough from that point to configure the port following the instructions supplied by HUMAX and then work through to successfully applying the software update to the PVR.So ... it works.But for a device like this to be supplied with absolutely no instructions is appalling really ... I guess you get what you pay for.If you're comfortable with messing with setting up drivers and want something that does the job at low cost then this is fine and deserves 5 stars.If you aren't comfortable with messing with driver software then maybe it's better to look elsewhere ... if you can't get it to work then it's not worthy of any stars at all.

Malgré les pilotes fournis par le constructeur, les pilotes ne s'installent pas correctement.Le PC reconnait le port, mais ne peut pas s'y connecter.