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Full Version: Prolific USB adapters
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A few years ago when I was the FAE (apps engineer) supporting Prolific for the company I was working for, I mentioned to the club to steer away from Prolific based USB adapters.  While Prolific through the early 2000's had good market share with their 2303 chip, FDDI and SiLabs were starting to capture more market share.  Somewhere along the line, about the time Windows 7 was released, a rouge driver made it out for the 2303 and that driver caused the Prolific 2303 based USB to Serial chips to BSOD your Windows 7 machine if you tried to use the device.  That issue still exists today with Windows 7.  So my advice then and now is to purchase only SiLabs or FDDI based USB to RS-232 adapters if you need to procure one.

Having laid the ground work with the above statement, move on to Windows 10.  Most folks will move to Win10 from Win7 if you haven't already (or maybe you'll move to Linux), but I've found that Win10 is a bit more forgiving on the Prolific 2303 chip.  If you install an older version of the driver, from 2009, the IC will work with Windows 10.  I installed 3.3.10.140 driver from circa 2009 and the cable seems to work.  The cable was destined for the recycle bin and thought I'd give it one more chance to play nice.

So if you have one of these kicking around, it may be worth while to give this a shot.  If you need the driver I can post it.

73,

Steve - KC1SA