Hyper Terminal + USB to Serial on Vista

Most of you must be aware that Windows Vista lacks the Hyper Terminal even in the Ultimate Edition! also. I was really frustrated with a laptop with no COM port and Windows Vista that doesn’t have the Terminal Software. I was sure that there must be third-party software out there which will do the job, but will I really give up the trusty Terminal Services Client that I was so much used to?

I copied Hyper Terminal Software from a Windows XP SP2 machine, its easy to find via the Open Target Location option of the short-cut properties window. However when tried to start the copied program, the system complained about a missing hypertrm.dll file, which was again easy to find from the System32 folder of the XP system and copied it over to the System32 folder of the Vista system. I tried to open it again, wow…that’s more like it…it was working.

And then since my laptop did not have a built-in COM port, I used a USB to DB9 cable which used to self-install drivers like ‘magic’ in XP. Since my USB to DB9 cable didn’t have any logo, trademark,etc it was a little difficult to find a good working driver, however I stumbled upon a fortune cookie and soon I was configuring my Router!

Here is the Hyper Terminal + DLL file zipped.
And here are the USB to DB9 drivers for Vista 32-bit again zipped.
In case you need it here is the link which I downloaded the drivers, I think it might be handy since its got various other versions of the driver for various platforms.