StarTech.com 3ft (1m) USB to Serial Cable, DB9 Male RS232 to USB Converter, Prolific IC, USB to Serial Adapter for PLC/Printer/Scanner/Switch, USB to COM Port Adapter, Windows/Mac

Product Overview

AI-generated summary

For £18.38 ex-VAT, this is a sensible “get-you-working” USB-to-serial option—especially if you’ve got legacy kit in the wild (PLC/3rd-party printers, older scanners, switch consoles) and you don’t want to spend time chasing drivers. The big plus here is the use of a Prolific chipset: in day-to-day reseller/IT support terms, that usually means fewer surprises across Windows and macOS than no-name adapters, and better odds of reliable COM port behaviour when you’re doing configuration or maintenance work.

Who should buy: teams doing routine access to RS232 devices who need a short, dependable cable/adaptor and value supportability over bells and whistles. It’s also ideal for engineers who keep a “spare serial adapter” in the laptop bag for site calls. Who shouldn’t: if you’re dealing with mission-critical comms at odd baud rates, long cabling runs, or you need something guaranteed to be rock-solid in environments with heavy USB power quirks—then you’ll want to standardise on a known model and test it in your exact workflow before committing fleet-wide.

Would I sell it? Yes, as a low-cost, practical field adapter, but I’d buy it expecting it to be used for typical RS232 console/config scenarios—not as a premium solution for high-stakes industrial data transfer. If your customers frequently hit driver or “device won’t enumerate” issues, the Prolific angle makes this a safer bet than most in this price bracket.