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By: Masked Webmaster

The USB Part II
!!UPDATE!! 11/00
Some people are experiening certain problems when using particular USB components;
such as the USB ZIP Drive - which when used on systems containing a non-standard
USB controller chip can stop and reset during file transfers.

Most common errors can be correctly if a newer driver is downloaded and installed.

We look into the "Why" part:

We found out the error occurs when a device communicates to a chip using either a
Open Host Controller Interface or the Universal Host Controller Interface when it was
designed for only one or the other.

Some problems USB still has:

USB signals can interfere with power management.
Two Controller chips which don't always use identical specifications.
Some Controller chips were "born" buggy - causing pauses or restarts in the middle of a transfer.
Overpowered devices can lead to crashes when the system it is running on itself is underpowered.
Many Windows 95 problems.
No USB support at all on Windows NT 4.0

Original Article:

As you may know, when the PC was first designed (at least the one
we are most familiar with) they only figured on a total of 15 IRQs
(interrupts) to assign to cards and your PCs internal components.

Well forward to 1999 and for the most part its still the same,
unless you have a USB port.

In this article we will discuss how USB will help ease your PC
upgrade pains.

The USB or Universal Serial Bus technology was designed and
for the most part- implemented by Intel a few years ago.

They saw the need for more interrupts than what current technology
offers. Their quagmire was - How do I add interrupts and keep the
PC IBM compatible?

Their solution was USB.

A Case For USB
Here is a real-world case for USB....

Our Editor has a fairly decent machine - but he likes to experiment
with video as a hobby.

He added a Iomega Buzz video capture system - which comprises of
a SCSI-II card and external capture device.

Click here to see this IRQ table

Well with all his sound card and other cards comprising of the majority
of the other IRQs he was forced to move his printer to another machine.
This over time became an inconvenience- every time a print was complete
he had to make an extra trip to the office next to his.

The Full Report
As we promised here is the "low down" on the USB bay port:

Installation was a snap, no power adapter was required for what
we needed. We had Windows 98 recognizing the USB hub
immediately.

The Problem
Neither our serial mouse nor the tablet input devices would work on the
built in serial port of the USB bay.

We also tried installing a Epson color inkjet printer on the printer interface-
also no luck. What did work was our Citizen color dot matrix printer.

NOTE: Some if not all of these limitations are expected to be corrected
in the next update of the windows drivers. We will wait and see - and
update on this article on any new items to report.

In conclusion, we feel that USB ports are still in the experimental phase
and is really too early to try adapting any components that weren't designed
for the USB interface. Our suggestion is to stick to the "tried and true"
for now.

What was supposed to be a quick fix for our situation turned out to
be a disappointment.