Do people actually use...

[alber]

serial ports for something?

on my 486 i had a mouse that used one a loooooooong time ago.
and have heard some digital camera's use them also, slooooooow tranfer of pics!

what else?




regards

[dead_eye]

palm pilot hotsyncs,

[HAL9000]

Nope, disabled on all three machines.

[RJ]

Only old mice and some external modems.

I also disabled all COMs. USB is better and faster. .
So just disable your COMs, and free up IRQ's.

RJ

[audiyoda]

I second the palm hotsync. There are digital video cams that can take stills that transfer via a serial connection rather than the firewire line.

-Craig

[mbossman2]

Serial ports are good for setting up connections to the aux ports on some devices (routers come to mind) for initial setup and configuration.

[melloman]

Hardware modems and Linux (name your flavor, they all love to use a hardware port.

[azscary]

My DSL Modem uses a serial cable to configure and adjust settings.

[Nuclear Krusader]

I'm about to get an external serial modem. Those aren't "winmodems".

[lpc300]

Another Palm Pilot hotsync. Two USB versions died within 6 months...serial version still going strong.

[glc]

Palm Pilot hotsync
Mice
REAL modems
UPS communications cables
Telnet into routers

[Floppyman]

I use one of mine to hook my graphing calculator up to my computer. I can then transfer programs, that I downloaded for it off the web, and use them on my calculator.

[highrisemech]

I still use serial port for my digital camera. Actually I've never
even tried the USB for digital pics. I don't use it that much anyway though.

[Paul Victorey]

I have a microcontroller programming board attached to my serial port.

Odd, it used to be, serial ports were more useful but most PCs had only one. Now, they're LESS useful, but many come with 2 standard...

[Razzel]

One port I use with my palm hotsync, the other I use for my Texas Instrument TI-83 graphics calculator so I can send programs and graphs between the two.

[Computer Hobbyist]

My daughter uses a serial port for her old digital camera. We are buying her a newone for her birthday that uses UBS. Except for a hardware modem connected to another computer, not much use.

CH