Hi,

I just read from another forum that it is possible to fry your cable if you had an accidental short. My partner was working on our project a few days ago and with the usb cable connected to her laptop and 9v power into our setup, she managed to fry the ram on her computer causing it to shut down permenantly. I'm still a bit annoyed but owell .. accidents i suppose.

I'm fairly confident that the usb cable circuitry is probably burnt out at this point. But let's say I plug in a usb device such as an external hard-drive. I'm not able to see the COM & LPT section on my computer (Windows-7, 64bit, HP pavilion g4) Is that normal ? Will it appear when I plug in a working nerd kits usb cable ?

Also .. is there any other way I can test the cable in question while I have another on the way ?

Here is what I'm looking at:

Can't seem to get a direct link to that pic. Here:

http://img847.imageshack.us/content_round.php?page=done&l=img847/4062/screenshotmd.png&via=mupload

Also .. I have downloaded the driver specially for windows-7 that was provided in another thread. I can look for it if you like but I'm pretty sure that's not the issue.

If your computer has no built in com or lpt ports, you won't see the icon in device manager until you plug in a working cable.

Okay .. so an external hard drive plugged into the usb port, or a camera or an mp3 player will not pop this icon up ?

Thanks !

No, because most don't use RS232 COM ports or LPT printer ports. Most of those devices will show up under IDE controllers, disk drives, etc...

Thank you Rick.