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My modern Toshiba still has a serial port. I have several Garmin GPSes
and they all drive FliteDeck just fine.

I think with USB it is especially important that the GPS be connected and
running before you open FliteDeck. Once the GPS is connected make sure it
appears as a USB device in Device Manager. Without that, there isn't a
chance it will work.


Are you quite sure about that? I think the oposite. If the program (flitemap)
is expecting a Com Port, it will not work with a USB device. The idea of the
USB/Serial adapter is to emulate a traditional com port over the USB
interface. You should end up with what looks like a standard Windows com port.
After this, you must make sure your Com number is right (Com1 and Com3 are
most common for this type of application - check and see if this can be set in
flitemap). The baud rate has to be right, as well as any handshaking and flow
control options. You also have to check and make sure you don't have any
conflicts on that IRQ. Right-click on MyComputer and scroll down to "MANAGE"
to check for sharing and conflicts. Windows com ports sometimes take a bit of
fiddling around to get them to talk. You may want to use a terminal program
like HyperTerminal to suss out the communications parameters.

G Faris