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# Fix: Prolific PL2303 Windows 10/11
- URL: https://bjornsblog.nl/fix-prolific-pl2303-usb-to-serial-in-windows-10-11/
- Published: 2024-03-04T09:10:53.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T16:02:40.000Z
- Author: Björn
- Tags: General, Tips and tricks, #Migrated-1792765222485, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-10-23 16:20

The people at Prolific obviously want to sell new hardware, so they decided to cripple the PL2303 USB to serial adapter cable by disabling it with new drivers. When installing this cable, you'll find that it doesn't work, and if you look it up in Device Manager, you see the following device:

PL2303HXA PHASED OUT SINCE 2012\. PLEASE CONTACT YOUR SUPPLIER

The thing is, that this is nonsense. The cable works just fine with the right drivers. Now I'm not going to rant about how I think about this practice, but I think you can guess.

You can download working drivers below. They are just the 2008 version of the official driver. If you don't know how to manually install drivers I'm redirecting you to google :)  

[IO-Cable\_PL-2303\_Drivers-Generic\_Windows\_PL2303\_Prolific](https://bjornsblog.nl/content/files/2026/10/io-cable%5Fpl-2303%5Fdrivers-generic%5Fwindows%5Fpl2303%5Fprolific.zip)

It might be that sometimes Windows updates the drivers again to those crippling drivers, but then you can just select the older drivers from the list.

Please let me know in the comments if this was the solution for you.