New Laptop Time what to get

I just got Dell Precision 7520 with M.2 SSD
Added second SATA SSD for VMs (internal slot near the battery) and two additional sticks of RAM making total of 48GB.

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Mine only has 32 GB of RAM...

And only 1TB 7200 RPM HDD and 1TB m.2 NVMe SSD.

DwSoFt said:

I used to thing a real serial ort was a must but I now have a good USB serial converter from www.plccable.com and haven't looked back


As for laptops I run 5 different VMS and my current dell has been lagging ( when running any vm) so I was looking at a new Dell. Ayers have treated me poorly and dell's good so I will stick with them most likely. I'm going to look at the links posted in here though.
My current lagging setup has 8gb of ram but no solid state drive and also dual core and the clock speed is lower. It did its job when I bought it and I will keep it for a spare. But my needs have increased. Lol

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Have you had to work with SLC5/01 processors with a PIC this way? I think I read that it won't work through a USB to serial adapter, though I'd love to know otherwise. I have one that I ordered form plccable.com that has worked on 97% of my needs, it's just that one that leads me to pulling out a dusty old laptop with one purpose left keeping it from the recycle bin.

godcixelsyd said:

Have you had to work with SLC5/01 processors with a PIC this way? I think I read that it won't work through a USB to serial adapter, though I'd love to know otherwise. I have one that I ordered form plccable.com that has worked on 97% of my needs, it's just that one that leads me to pulling out a dusty old laptop with one purpose left keeping it from the recycle bin.

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Virtual machines are really great at piping the USB data directly to the guest OS. It is generally referred to as "USB passthrough". I've never had an issue. You install your drivers for the device in the guest OS, and the host OS lets it deal with the USB port directly.

Another thing that can happen is that you can set your usb->serial up as a real serial port in the guest machine, and the host OS treats it like one. This works quite well, too. Stay away from the prolific usb->serial adapters. I've never had issue with the FTDI ones, but have had all kinds with the prolific chips due to a combination of their drivers and them being counterfeit a majority of the time.

I think you are right on the PIC box not working through USB-serial adopter. However, those thing are a unicorn now so I wouldn't be too worried. In worst case scenario, we can always dig up an old laptop off the junk pile.

The 5/01 and 5/02 are a special kind of "data sidewalk". They don't generate a token to start the token passing process. If you have them connected to a DH-485 network with another device that will start the token passing process, then you can connect your USB-DH485 device to that network and access the SLC just fine. The 5/03 doesn't suffer from this issue. The same problem has cropped up when using Red Lion HMI and their DH485 driver. If there is a PIC or some other device generating the first token, then it works. If is is just a 5/01 or 5/02 and the HMI, they both sit there silently waiting for someone to tell them its okay to speak.

More detail on this:
http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=57286