I've got a really old laptop that's just sitting around. Only problem with it is, there's not an appropriate port to plug the serial cable into, as there is with a friend's Dell. I was wondering if adapting it to use the printer com port was do-able and if I could just snag up an adaptor like that at Best Buy or something.

 

You would have to have a terminal emulator that works off of paralel port. It's too complicated. Do you have USB ports or is the machine older than the USB standard?

 

Older than USB. It's ancient and weighs like 20 lbs. Ha ha. It's running Win95.

 

Here's a funny ending to my dilemma. I got to really poking around that laptop, and on the underside, there's a little switch. So I flip it and a side panel opened, revealing - you guessed it- , the proper port! How about that? And here I was all bewildered by it just having a printer/monitor port in the back.

Problem solved!

 

Heh, yeah, with older laptops they actually covered switches and nowadays they're cutting costs everywhere.