I installed a USB to dual RS232 adapter on my laptop (has vista) but after some time one of the ports disappeared and i got an error message when you connect the adapter.
After this i found the laptop would hang up on power on, no drive activity and dead, with the adapter connected to a usb port.
I have now discovered that its a usb to RS232 adapter that is causing the problem, which certainly was not what i was expecting !.. it seems with the adapter connected to the USB port the laptop hangs on power on (this is right at the start, there is no hard drive activity or anything at all) which surprised me as i would expect vista to start doing things with the USB a bit later on once it had got part way through its boot up sequence. If i unplug the adapter then it starts up just fine. The adapter is a USB to dual RS232 port type and uses the Prolific chipset, when i attach the adapter when the laptop is running i get the "one of your usb devices has malfunctioned' type messages.
Looking on the prolific site i see some mention of vista, implying maybe there isnt a driver, im wondering if anyone out there has found a fix for the problem?
http://www.prolific.com.tw
Does anyone know of dual or single RS232 adapters that work with vista? or should the XP driver work fine?
Many thanks
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by: KenneniahPosted on 2008-03-19 at 06:43:23ID: 21161404
If it's causing the laptop to hang before Vista has even started to load, then it's not a driver problem. Especially since you say the device was working fine in Vista earlier (which would lead me to believe Vista has built-in compatible drivers) I would say that mostly likely the device itself has gone bad and needs to be replaced.