Hi ! I am new to the world of PC hardware and I was hoping for some help from all you smart computer whizzes out there. I'm having a problem trying to figure out and understand COM ports. I have a laptop computer with a PCMCIA socket - well there are actually 2 sockets. This computer came equipped with a 3Com modem + LAN PCMCIA card which was plugged into Socket 1. There was an open socket 2 which I assumed was for any additional modems / LAN cards that I might wish to install. The original modem card was very slow so I decided to install another 56Kbps modem PCMCIA card into the additional Socket 2 while retaining the original modem+LAN card which came installed in Socket 1. I wanted to find out which COM port this Socket 2 card use so that I configure this when I install the hardware and the drivers using the Add Hardware applet in the Control Panel. But how do I find out which COM port is connected to which socket ? As far as I know, there are only 2 COM ports - Com1 and Com2. When I checked the device settings on the original modem+LAN PCMCIA card it was using Com3. How in the world does COM3 come into the picture ? Is COM3 a physical COM port on the motherboard ? I hear of people adding additional COM ports ? How and why is this done ? Is there any particular website that could give me complete info about how ports work and how you can add ports ?
