We have several of these barcode scanners that are serial port based. The current software we are using them with has been written to accept data coming from the serial port. You can get a version of these scanners that connects inline with your keyboard. Using a keyboard type means the software doesn’t need anything special to scan into Windows applications.
We are converting over to new software that is not written to recognize serial based scanners. Someone mentioned a software solution and it’s turned out to work very well. It’s called BC-Wedge. It’s a small application that sits in the background and sends scans from the bar code scanner to any Windows application. There might be some other solutions out there, but this one is reasonably priced and easy to install.