Going from parallel dongle to USB

[Dodgy]

As most pcs seem to phasing out parallel ports, I'm wondering what my options will be when I move to one without a parallel port. At the mo I have a parallel dongle, and I would prefer not to have to change my dongle as this will mean re registering a lot of my plugins to the new dongle... Or would it?
Is it possible to get a usb dongle with the code of my old dongle?

Could I use a parallel to usb adaptor with the sentinel driver and not have to replace my dongle?

Any help would be greatly appreciated :)

Mike

[mattclary]

I was thinking about moving to USB before I made my recent upgrade, but what I found was that most of the newer motherboards (875 chipset anyway) still had parallel ports. Seems like most dongle issues you read about nowadays are related to the USB dongle, so I have no real reason to go that route.

One thing that caught my eye recently, when I built the new system I did a clean install of everything. On my old machine, I had 6.5 then upgraded to 7.5 so I didn't see the same behavior: First thing was that the dongle driver didn't install correctly by itself during the overall LW install, I had to manually go to the CD and run the setup under the Sentinel directory, and second, you CLEARLY get a message to remove the USB dongle while the drivers are installed. I have a feeling a lot of the people with bad USB dongles may have missed that line of text.

I also read that when using the USB dongle, it still requires the parallel port dongle drivers, so without a parallel port, there could be issues.

[Wade]

I have the USB dongle working on a shuttle xpc which has no parallel port with windows xp pro, and all is well. Do a search on the forum as this has been addressed a time or two. I think that many third party folk will have to give you a new code to work with your new dongle thou.

P.S. Shuttle makes a cool mini in the XPC.

Wade