It's unexpectedly general these days you find an amazing machine that does everything you want it to do, but then you get home and find out that between the lightning-fast processor and terabyte hard drive, you're lost something - a serial port.

In an effort to implement latest standards, like USB and FireWire, lots of laptop manufacturers have let serial ports fall by the wayside. They don't take into account the millions of people and businesses that still require serial ports for one application or another.

You can use a USB to Serial Adapter to simply and rapidly add a serial port to your laptop. The nice thing about the adapter is that you can use multiple adapters on one machine and dynamically set the COM assignment.

Many PDA's, GPS units, routers, printers, fax machines, etc. still require serial ports. A lot of these devices are moving to newer standards, most notably USB, but many still operate on legacy technologies because of the difficulty in rewriting drivers for the newer standards.