Notebooks that still have legacy ports

On Jan 31, 4:38 am, Joerg <notthisjoerg...@removethispacbell.net>
wrote:

> I had a mutual agreement with our IT guy that he doesn't touch my
> machine unless I consent, and he gets to dig in when the mint cookies
> come in from the girl scout cookie sale.

Unfortunately our work machines are required [by policy] to have
remote control software loaded. Somebody in Bangalore presses a
button, and my entire department gets an update pushed onto their
machines.

Fortunately, somehow my machine has been broken - the firewall is up
and can't be disabled - so they can't get into it. (I swear this was
not intentional).

> Now I am my own IT guy :-)))

I know - I have none of these problems at home. It takes the IT
department of a multi-billion-dollar, >100K-employee company to screw
things up so effectively.

On Mon, 29 Jan 2007 12:08:59 -0800, SMS <scharf.steven@geemail.com> wrote
in message  <45be545c$0$68985$742ec2ed@news.sonic.net>:

>Anyone know any current models, besides these, that still have serial 
>and/parallel ports?

A notebook can use ethernet --> RS-232/485/422 converters such as
www.comtrol.com Si or RTS series or www.Lantronics.com / www.netbiter.com.
They show up regularly on eBay for dimes on the dollar.

I find this more convenient than plugging and unplugging the serial
equipment anyway, and they allows for easy access from different computers.
While not typically important/required for bench work, this is very helpful
for automation/monitoring where the added bulk of the ethernet--> RS-xxx
adapter typically isn't an issue and at least part of the
infrastructure/equipment is fixed in place and doesn't travel with the
laptop anyway.

... Marc
Marc_F_Hult
www.ECOntrol.org

<robertwessel2@yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:1170205108.748464.295770@k78g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> On Jan 30, 6:12 pm, cs_post...@hotmail.com wrote:
>> On Jan 29, 3:08 pm, SMS <scharf.ste...@geemail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Anyone know any current models, besides these, that still have serial
>> > and/parallel ports?
>>
>> I wonder how long it will be before we hear that some frustrated
>> engineer has gone and implemented himself an entire legacy PC on a
>> large FPGA eval board in order to get the real parallel port(s) needed
>> to run a legacy programmer or device...
>
>
> Of course you actually can get PCI and PC Card (PCMCIA) "real"
> parallel ports.  There's at least one vendor hawking a dual function
> PC card with both a 16550 and legacy parallel port on it.
>
> Although with the rate at which PCI slots seem to getting displaced by
> PCI-E slots, I wonder how long it'll be before finding a PC with a PCI
> slot will be as hard as finding one with an ISA slot.  Not that
> there's anything that would prevent someone from doing a PCI-E
> parallel/serial card, but I've already run into a couple of situations
> where I've had a problem because all the PCI slots on a machine were
> full with stuff that didn't have a PCI-E replacement.  In the last
> case I had to discard the internal modem and install an external USB
> one.

There is a pcie card with  serial and parallel port
from http://www.softio.com/
Have support for windows and linux and will work on a mac under parallels or 
boot camp
or even a mac running linux.
http://www.softio.com/ic0650kb.htm

http://www.softio.com/pcie_pci_express_printer_parallel_port_card_ic0652kb.htm
http://www.softio.com/ic0653kb.htm

I haven't yet used one of the above cards directly myself.

Seen them used for pic and other micro programming ,
Haven't seen them used for fpga programming yet.

Alex