Got a Dell Inspirion 1150 with windows XP home for Christmas. I bought the necessary items to use it with my Good Ol Garmin GPS III+ . First off why does no one make a USB GPS cable! How many Laptops these days still have serial ports! Maybe there is one but I jut missed it!

I bought a combination power / data GPS cable on ebay for $15, its not a Garmin brand, says its made by “Gibson”

I also bought a serial to USB adapter, which came with a driver disk.

I have had Mapsource Topo for a while and have had no problems with it on my home computer. (got a great deal on it, knew I would have a laptop eventually) Connects with the Gamin supplied cable just fine to the desktop PC.

Put it all together, installed mapsource and the drivers for the adapter. The computer keeps giving me errors that the GPS is not connected! I have tried manually selecting COM1-COM4, tried both USB ports and still get the same thing. I have also tried it with EasyGPS with the same results.

I tried using my old Garmin Brand cable with the laptop to rule out the off brand cable causing the problem. I also tried the off brand GPS cable on the desktop computer and it worked fine.

A friend of mine has the same set up on his newer Dell laptop with XP and mapsource metroguide as well as Easy GPS. He looked at it and all my settings and could find nothing wrong. Only difference on his is that he has a different brand of adapter and a Garmin brand DC/Data cable.

For now the thinking is that the USB / Serial Adapter is bad. Going to try his adapter on my computer later today to see. Just wondering if anyone has any other ideas on things to check?

And yes I’m still here. Just not much free time. I have lots of stuff on my Cache todo list to get all my caches back up to snuff.

I have a Dell Inspiron 1150 that is giving me fits. To get it to recognize the usb/serial adapter, I have to load the drivers every time (I just leave the cd in the drive now). Usually by the third try it starts working, what a pain in the butt.

I KNOW you guys are just as smart as me, but have you tried using the other USB port? I leave my palm connected to a serial port in the back and if I use one of the USB ports in the front, its a no go, but the other works just fine. Ramness, I have the same config as you except I use a Sony Viao, if your having all those problems its gotta be the Dell. Good luck.

Tried a different USB / serial Adapter, loaded the drivers and the GPS worked with my laptop fine. Guess I just got a bad adapter, what a relief that it’s not my computer. Time to go shopping again!

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How many Laptops these days still have serial ports!

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Laptops usually have serial ports but they are accessed by a telephone jack and internal modem in most cases.

To use a 9-pin serial cable with a laptop you will need a docking station.

Apparently, mine is picky about what USB port that I plug the GPS into. The top one works every time, the bottom one; once in three tries.

Not totally related, but Windows can be picky about devices plugged into serial ports of laptops at boot.
It tries to auto-detect a serial mouse.

There is a thread here about the switches to add to the boot.ini file to turn this off.

I don't believe this impacts USB ports though, ....but you never know whay Microsoft changes from version to version, SP to SP.

Kenneth

Most likely not Ramness570's problem. But I am posting it in case some similar happens to someone else.

First a little history my previous motherboard in my desktop only had one serial port but several USB ports. I got tired of swapping GPS and Palm cables, so I bought a serial/usb adapter and hooked up the palm to it. Everthing worked.

I got a new motherboard awhile back and it had two serial ports so I quit using the adapter. I just used both serial ports. I decided to give my adapter to someone who got a new computer for Christmas without a serial port. So I wanted to make sure it work with my GPS. I had all kinds of trouble until I turned off palm hotsync. Now this don't make sense because hotsync was using com2 and the adapter was set for com3. But mapsource could not see my GPS until hotsync was turned off. Then it mapsource, the adapter and GPS all get along.

OK now I feel really stupid!

I emailed the seller on ebay to tell him I got a bad cable. He responded telling me he would do a refund or replacement and also told me he knew that this cable doesn’t work with Garmin GPS units. (I had not told him what it would not work on)

I sat there thinking “sure would have been nice of you to put that in the auction description” but before I responded with that I went back and looked at the auction again.

Sure enough there it was “Various USB Serial adapters have different incompatibilities. In particular, this cable is incompatible with GARMIN GPS” DOH!

I responded with “a refund would be fine, thanks”

When I bought it a made a list of people selling them with cables longer than 2 feet and then added up the buy it now price and shipping price to see which one was the best price. This one was the best… but dang if I didn’t read the whole thing first! Oh well lesson learned!

Anyone have any experience with these 3 adapters?

Belkin $24


“micro” $22


IOgear $24


These are all available locally in stores

Mine looks exactly like the IOGear one you have listed, right down to the light, so I guess I have the IOGear. I picked it up at MicroCenter for $14, I think... works fine with both my Rino's.

One caveat with it is whenever I reboot my Thinkpad, WinXP (Pro, if it matters) randomly assigns it a COM address, anything from COM2, COM9, COM11, COM10, etc.. I mostly solved that problem by locking the adapter to COM2, but even then sometimes that doesn't work and the Rinos can't be found.

"Uninstalling" the adapter in WinXP, then unpluggin/replugging it (allowing XP to "reinstall it" and doing the COM assignment) solves that problem.

Outside of that WinXP-related problem, the adapter itself works just peachy!

Finally found the problem. I have to wait for the laptop to boot completely before plugging in serial adapter and then wait until it is recognized by the laptop, then plug in the gps. Takes about three minutes total.

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Originally posted by Ertman110:
Finally found the problem. I have to wait for the laptop to boot completely before plugging in serial adapter and then wait until it is recognized by the laptop, then plug in the gps. Takes about three minutes total.

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See my previous post about startup switches.
You can continue to wait or enter the values and have it connected.

Kenneth

I didn't even know the first item existed!

Modernizing the GPS interface

-AndymanD

Looks like I'm about to head down this same set of tracks.

How'd it work out Ramness? Did you go with the IOGear? Any snags?

Yup the IOGear has been working fine. I am very pleased with my current in truck laptop setup.