How to cope with the loss of HyperTerminal in Windows Vista and Later

Some of us still feel the need to talk to devices over a serial (including USB-to-serial and Bluetooth). There are many interesting devices that prefer to talk to your computer using the old-fashioned serial protocol: GPS devices, cell phones and cellular broadband cards, and microcontroller boards such as Arduino. Most of the time, you can use the utilities that came with these gadgets to do everything you need to, but sometimes the hacker in us gets the urge to talk directly with a device.

Starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft stopped shipping the venerable HyperTerminal application that so many of used to connect to serial devices. Fortunately, right around that time, the PuTTY SSH package added support for serial terminals. So you can switch over to using PuTTY for all your serial communications needs.