usb ports

This device is actually manufactured by a company called Aten:

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The initial drivers did have many problems, however; I was finally able to get the product to work on Windows XP. I down loaded the "make floppy" driver for XP from the manufactures website. Next, download the most recent windows 2000 driver and try and install it (yes, you have to download two separate drivers). The Windows 2000 driver will prompt you for a file it can not locate, point to your floppy drive (location of XP driver) and it will install the XP driver. If you check "Device Manager" you will first see a question mark prior to the install, after the install windows recognizes the device without a problem. You can even go into advaced properties and then change the Com Port number to a lower number then 5 (the default). It does seem strange that they don't have a simple fix for this, but at least I found a work around.

Iogear has always filled a market nitch of specialized computing products, so I've come to not expect a lot of support, but all the products generally work and are of good bulid quality (they don't fall apart).

I bought mine in BestBuy store and tried it on both Dell Latitude D600/win XP and Dell desktop/win 2000 with GPS device (Trimble Placer 450).
It worked better than expected since Windows XP recognized new USB hardware and showed me new COM4 port in Device Manager instantly. No need for installation CD that is btw. supplied with the cable. I could instantly get data to the HyperTerminal application.

The only thing I do not like is the price. I would go for the cheaper, but had to have the cable immediately, therefore I purchased it in the store.

I regret having to amend my previous recommendation. The adapter still works fine on my laptop in Win ME, but in Win XP on my desktop it has some problems. When I plug in the adapter, sometimes XP puts it in COM4, but sometimes COM5. Either way, it will not work unless I reboot XP with the adapter connected. I think this is an XP problem, but it certainly makes using the adapter less convenient. I have found Win XP to be about as awful as previous versions of windows ... it is true that it seldom goes blue screen ... but I still have to reboot a couple of times a day, and hardware installation is still "plug and pray". To think Bill Gates is the richest guy in the country ... maybe Marx was right after all.