Blog: The Life Of A Supreme Ruler

Prolific PL-2303 driver woes

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• General

— orudge @ 24/03/2009 3:53 pm

I figured I’d post this in case anybody else out there on the Internet is having problems. I’ve been looking for drivers for my Prolific PL-2303 USB to serial port cable – specifically, 64-bit drivers for Windows XP x64/Vista x64. There are some on the official web site, but they didn’t like to work for me. It turns out some bright spark decided to create two incompatible devices, the PL-2303 and the PL-2303-X (also PL-2303-H, PL-2303-HX), but give them the same USB vendor and device ID. If you happen to have a PL-2303 and can’t get the drivers to work, I found that the drivers here worked for me. (Thanks to the links in the comments on Rob Garrett’s blog for those.)

And please, to any hardware manufacturers: if you’re going to create incompatible devices, please don’t give them the same device ID.