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I understand the difference. What I wasn't sure of is whether the USB would appear as a COM port once it had a serial adapter. I bought an adapter, tried it, and, like you say, it was identified as a COM port, in fact, COM5. Thank you.
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I understand the difference. What I wasn't sure of is whether the USB would appear as a COM port once it had a serial adapter. I bought an adapter, tried it, and, like you say, it was identified as a COM port, in fact, COM5. Thank you.

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This Saturday, our school district will be running the Academic Decathlon, a huge event that involves scoring a series of tests from over 500 competitors. This year, new scoring software was issued. Unfortunately, the new software can not communicate with our Scantron Scanmark 2000 scanners on machines that are running XP. Almost all our laptops are XP machines except for a few HPs that run W2K Pro. <br />
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The scoring software will communicate with our Scanmark 2000 scanners when running on a W2K machine (e.g., my desktop). However, those HPs running W2K do not have COM ports. They only have USBs. I thought of using a serial to USB adapter. However, the scoring software will ask me to specify COM1 or COM2 to configure the scanner. The USB ports are not identified as COM ports, so I don't know that a serial-to-USB adapter would work. Is there any way around this?
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This Saturday, our school district will be running the Academic Decathlon, a huge event that involves scoring a series of tests from over 500 competitors. This year, new scoring software was issued. Unfortunately, the new software can not communicate with our Scantron Scanmark 2000 scanners on machines that are running XP. Almost all our laptops are XP machines except for a few HPs that run W2K Pro. 

The scoring software will communicate with our Scanmark 2000 scanners when running on a W2K machine (e.g., my desktop). However, those HPs running W2K do not have COM ports. They only have USBs. I thought of using a serial to USB adapter. However, the scoring software will ask me to specify COM1 or COM2 to configure the scanner. The USB ports are not identified as COM ports, so I don't know that a serial-to-USB adapter would work. Is there any way around this?

USB-to-Serial Adapter for Use With Scanmark 2000

A peripheral device is defined as a computer device, such as a keyboard or printer, that is not part of the essential computer (i.e., the memory and microprocessor). These auxiliary devices are intended to be connected to the computer and used in conjunction with it. Examples of external peripherals include mouse, keyboard, printer, monitor, external Zip drive or scanner, while internal peripherals include CD-ROM drive, CD-R drive or internal modem. Today's new devices, such as tablets, smartphones and wearable computing devices are considered peripherals as they can be connected and used on a computer system. The difference, however, is that these devices can run independently of the computer system.