Dell laptops, serial ports?

Brainboxes

has anyone tried the brain boxes PCIe express card serial adaptors, ive been looking at the XC235 which i think does not protrude out further than the laptop edge and has a plug in serial cable by the looks of the photo i have of it.

My experience, now days most USB adaptors are good enough for most PLCs if they are setup right. I.e. setup for serial ports 1 or 2, although recently I have found this is not so important.
AB though is hard to get working reliably. I have not tried one of their adaptors.
Finally, for AB, I now try to only use Ethernet where possible. For low end jobs, I will generally use a Micrologix 1100 or 1400 due to the built in Ethernet port. For the 1000s, I just use patience.

I'm using a Dell Latitude E6410. It doesn't have a serial port on the laptop but the docking station does have a serial port.

ive just ordered a Dell E6520 and i do have a dell docking station already which has a serial port and i know of the E-Legacy adaptor which is a slim line adaptor that utilises the same port socket under the laptop as the docking station but i want something alittle less bulky, unfortunatly i crnt get one of the Keyspan here in the UK so im having to find something else, i was thinking of the AB USB to Serial adaptor, but may give the express card a go first.

I have the AB 9300 and a couple of keyspans. I use the keyspan 50% of the time and my real serial port the other. Ground loops do strange things to dell laptops mouse quites working.

I think the Keyspan is good choice. I have had to go to a SeaLevel branded one for the quirky non-AB stuff. The SeaLevel you can setup your port and make it talk to about anything, in my case, a datalogger that the KeySpan wouldn't. Expensive compared to KeySpan, has a 56 inches cable, which is nice.

I have one of the AB serial adapters and don't really prefer it though it works well.

John

I have a couple of el-cheapo Dick Smith USB-to-serial converters (Australian electronics store) which work pretty well most of the time.

Have also seen weird things happen with my built in mouse going haywire / not working when using these even with the mains adapter unplugged.

So for those occasions, I have an Adam-4562 USB to RS232/422/485 converter from Advantech. They're not cheap, but they do provide some decent isolation. The only down side is they only have the RX/TX lines (i.e. no control lines) but thats not normally a problem for me.

I have few brands of converters include keyspan.The best is Quatech Express Card.Not cheap but do the job.
Since we switch from Dell to HP we have serial port build in, so it is not issue for the moment.