External USB storage devices

jmnew51 · #1 December 29th, 2006, 04:38 AM

I'm in the proccess of upgrading my system from 98 to XP. I've had no end of trouble trying to get removable storage devices to work on my system using 98 se. I am assuming that when I upgrade to XP I will have less headaches with them. Cuz I eventually want an external hard drive. My only concern is that my system has USB 1.1 ports. I was wondering if this could be the cause of the problems with the external storage devices. I know that 2.0 is much faster than the 1.1, but I thought USB was USB when it comes to the systems ability to recognize a device.

Any advice would be great.

Thanx
Jim

P.S. The problem was with an mp3 player.

renegade600 · #2 December 29th, 2006, 04:49 AM

personally I believe you may be trading one problem for others by upgrading a 98 computer to xp. however to answer your question, there is no promises usb will work any better in xp on your computer. its going to depend upon your motherboard and what it supports. Normally if you have a usb 2 device, it will work on usb 1.1 but there again it depends upon the device.

jmnew51 · #3 December 29th, 2006, 05:03 AM

I was afraid of that. I don't see why the device wouldn't work with any MS OS as long as the proper drivers are installed. But it doesn't, so I'm assuming the hardware(motherboard, etc.)might be a little outdated. Well I need to hose my HD and install a new OS anyway so I figured i would give XP a try. I have a copy coming to me soon.
Thanx
Jim

oink · #4 December 29th, 2006, 06:58 AM

I have used add on pci usb cards several times to upgrade the usb. In several cases I left the old one enabled. The upgrade has worked well in all cases. The xp will most likely improve things providing the other hardware is compatible and you have sufficient processing power and memory. I would consider 512 the minimum. Having a second hd with the swap file on a partition on the 2nd drive can speed things up a good bit.

jmnew51 · #5 December 29th, 2006, 05:36 PM

I do have an empty pci slot that I could throw a USB card into. Never thought of that.
Thanx
Jim

jmnew51 · #6 December 30th, 2006, 02:21 AM

OK. How do you set the swap file to be on another hd or partition without the OS on that partition? I thought the swap file was part of the OS. Also I guess when I finally upgrade to XP, I can have the OS on one partition and another for data??? Will doing this speed things up too. Cuz I would think if the OS doesn't have to access all those extra files it would load faster and would just, all around, work better.
Thanx
Jim

oink · #7 December 30th, 2006, 06:07 AM

If you are going to Xp go here.