Uart

[Azgir]

My father-in-law called me over last night to fix a new winmodem (US Robotics) that he had tried to install and couldnt get to work. I got lucky and noticed that it was using an old UART. I figured no company would sell a modem using an 8250 chip and tried new drivers. After reinstalling a couple of times the modem finally worked.

How can a system be using the wrong UART? I didnt even know that you had a choice. I thought that the UART was an actual chip and you had no control over it. Did something get corrupted and my reinstalls fixed it?

If setting the UART is software and not hardware how would you go about changing it? Why would you want to? Is this another case of backwards compatability that you really dont need to know about unless your terminally curious like I am?

[SINND3R]

To my knowledge, UART chip is a firmware chip. Whether it can be flashed might depend on the manufacturer. I guess its possible that there was a detection error. Nothing surprises me with computers anymore.