Finally, USB 2.0 Success!
I rearranged my home office this weekend as part of an effort to really get serious about getting a video business off the ground. The place had just not felt right ever since I gave my iMac to my daughter-in-law. It left an empty desk sitting right next to my Dual 1 GHz PowerMac. Since I have an extra 17 inch Apple Studio LCD in the closet and I really expect I can use one more computer to edit and encode video, I gave a lot of thought to buying a G4 or a G5. But in the end, practicality and outstanding credit card debt won out. I decided instead to expand the hard disk capacity in my Quicksilver (the dual 1 GHz PowerMac) and reorganized my home office so that my Windows XP computer was a bit handier and able to fill in when both the Macs are busy. There was only one catch. I had not been able to get the XP machine to work with my USB 2.0 home network.
Every time I tried to scan using my Epson Photo 1660, I'd get a "scanner did not send image" error message. Worse, my new HP Business Inkjet 1100D would act strangely when attached to the Windows machine via the hub and spit out uncommanded pages with a line of garbage on it. Thinking the problem was with my USB hub, I tried several of them; but they made no difference. This past weekend after I finished moving desks around and building a bookcase, I tried troubleshooting the problem some more. Because the system gave me slow and sluggish responses and even the same errors with my scanner plugged directly into the PC, I began to suspect the motherboard's implementation of USB 2.0. (I'm running a MSI KT3 Ultra 2 updated with the latest BIOS.) So, deciding to try one more thing, I pulled a SIIG USB 2.0 PCI card out of my Quicksilver and put it in my XP computer, cranked up the PC, and turned off all the USB ports on the motherboard. Much to my delight, it worked!
Sunday afternoon, I drove over to a local Best Buy and picked up another copy of the SIIG card. I installed it in the XP machine, and it worked for a few hours. But, then after I shut down and restarted my system, my scanner performance became very slow, no better than USB 1.1 speeds. During troubleshooting, I made the mistake of trying the SIIG drivers for XP even though I was running XP's Service Pack 1, which has USB 2.0 drivers in it. Little yellow question marks popped up on some of the USB card's controller entries in Device Manager, and no amount of installing or reinstalling would fix them. Once again, XP had screwed me. That refurbished 1.6 G5 sitting at the Apple Store began looking attractive...
After a good night’s sleep and more pensive thought about the whole thing, I decided to try a couple of things before I threw in the towel and relegated the XP machine to running flight simulators and helping out with network access at work for me and my wife. I tried re-installing XP’s Service Pack 1. That had no effect. Then, I shut the computer down, shuffled its Ethernet, Firewire, and the USB 2 card into different PCI slots, and started it back up. Eureka! I was in business! The scanner was working via my network at USB 2.0 speeds. I flopped over to the Windows 98SE side of the machine and tried it again with equal success. In short, the PC began acting like I had been expecting it to. It’s nice having everything working….for once!
Every time I tried to scan using my Epson Photo 1660, I'd get a "scanner did not send image" error message. Worse, my new HP Business Inkjet 1100D would act strangely when attached to the Windows machine via the hub and spit out uncommanded pages with a line of garbage on it. Thinking the problem was with my USB hub, I tried several of them; but they made no difference. This past weekend after I finished moving desks around and building a bookcase, I tried troubleshooting the problem some more. Because the system gave me slow and sluggish responses and even the same errors with my scanner plugged directly into the PC, I began to suspect the motherboard's implementation of USB 2.0. (I'm running a MSI KT3 Ultra 2 updated with the latest BIOS.) So, deciding to try one more thing, I pulled a SIIG USB 2.0 PCI card out of my Quicksilver and put it in my XP computer, cranked up the PC, and turned off all the USB ports on the motherboard. Much to my delight, it worked!
Sunday afternoon, I drove over to a local Best Buy and picked up another copy of the SIIG card. I installed it in the XP machine, and it worked for a few hours. But, then after I shut down and restarted my system, my scanner performance became very slow, no better than USB 1.1 speeds. During troubleshooting, I made the mistake of trying the SIIG drivers for XP even though I was running XP's Service Pack 1, which has USB 2.0 drivers in it. Little yellow question marks popped up on some of the USB card's controller entries in Device Manager, and no amount of installing or reinstalling would fix them. Once again, XP had screwed me. That refurbished 1.6 G5 sitting at the Apple Store began looking attractive...
After a good night’s sleep and more pensive thought about the whole thing, I decided to try a couple of things before I threw in the towel and relegated the XP machine to running flight simulators and helping out with network access at work for me and my wife. I tried re-installing XP’s Service Pack 1. That had no effect. Then, I shut the computer down, shuffled its Ethernet, Firewire, and the USB 2 card into different PCI slots, and started it back up. Eureka! I was in business! The scanner was working via my network at USB 2.0 speeds. I flopped over to the Windows 98SE side of the machine and tried it again with equal success. In short, the PC began acting like I had been expecting it to. It’s nice having everything working….for once!
posted by Andy Foster at
2:21 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home