I recently bought a new laptop with a serial port.
I also found that all major manufacturers still carry a range of models with serial ports.
The best thing to do is carefully specify your PC to have all the features you need, and carefully review what you are going to get before you buy it.
Too many people look and go "I need a pentium 4" or "I want a pentium M" without checking all the other stuff.
Do you need:
* A serial port? What about for old PLCs, VSDs, programmable level detectors and Cisco Switches?
* A printer port? Do you have old printers or plotters that you need to use? or Citect dongels? or old Autocad dongels? Or parallel port Eprom programmers?
* PCMCIA ports, or more importantly -DUAL PCMCIA ports- Without a dual port you may not be able to use Modbus Plus converters.
* How many USB ports, One for the mouse, one for the Siement USB to MPI converter, One for the memory stick, one for the digital camera, Are they USB 1.1 or 2.0? Maybe you need some more, dual PCMCIA port, remember that?
* CD burner (These are normally standard now, but some IT sections of some companies have special arrangements.....)
* Floppy disc drive, forget this and you can be really badly off, also some older software requires internal FDD to pass authentication keys.
* Spare battery, with this you can often get 7 hour out of a new Centrino setup.
* Win XP home or Proffessional, if you don't specify count on getting the cheapest.
Doug
