The setup: I have a Intel motherboard inside my office desktop with a built-in serial port. Over the days, I managed to screw up the builtin COM port (and my friends at office did the same to their desktop PCs too.. haha!). What probably happened is that does to some ESD or overvoltage on one of the pins during experimentation caused the RS232 Driver on board the motherboard to get spoilt. As a result, the COM port (COM1 in this case) was detected alright by windows XP but Bray's Terminal or Hyperterminal were either not able to receive or transmit data out of the port. So we all got Serial Port PCI cards which costed around Rs.250 a piece. Each of these cards are based around the CH352 (more specifically CH325L) chip made by WCH (a chinese company). WCH Website (Chinese): www.wch.cn WCH Website (English): www.wch-ic.com CH352 Product Page and Datasheet: http://www.wch-ic.com/product/pci/ch352.asp All these cards have 2 Serial Ports on them. and they worked super fine on
