The
most common way to connect a piece of equipment to your computer
is via the USB (Universal Serial Bus) port. Pretty well all peripherals
are connected to computers with this method these days. The peripheral
world has come a long way via serial ports through parallel ports
and onto USB1 and now USB2 connections.
The
serial port connection was slow and original modem connections
used this method reaching heady transfer rates of 300 bits/second.
The parallel port connection was extensively used for connecting
printers and scanners. This allowed whole bytes (8 bits) of information
at a go instead of single bits with a serial port.
More
recently the USB connections have come into their own and connect
virtually all modern external devices to the computer. You can
even buy parallel/USB and serial/USB cables to connect older peripheral
devices to USB ports.
Now
you can get USB1 and USB2 ports – so what is the difference?
In both cases, a USB connected device will work with either, however,
there is a big difference in connection or data transfer speed.
The original USB1 port will transfer data at a maximum of 12Mbits/second,
but this slows significantly when multiple devices are connected
to a computer via a hub (multiway USB connector). This is due
to competition for the finite transfer bandwidth available.
USB2
has a much higher speed protocol than USB1, offering maximum transfer
speeds of around 480Mbits/sec. USB2 will make short work of transferring
large amounts of data – ideal for those 1Ggbyte memory cards.
If you intend to do a lot of large data transfers from memory
cards, scanners or external CD/DVD readers writers etc, then USB2
is a worthwhile investment. If you only have a printer or a wireless
mouse hooked up and still use USB1 ports, don’t worry, there
would be no noticeable difference in speed by upgrading.
Dave
Robb
Answer
to problem - reading CD-RW discs in Windows XP - Chris Tapsel
Last
month we published details of a problem that Harry McKnight was
having with images he had stored on CD. We have had some suggestions
on how to resolve these problems from Chris Tapsell, our thanks
to Chris for his help.
Re.
Harry's CD problems:
I wasn't sure what Harry's email address was, so I thought I'd
send you a note. Please would you pass this on to him if he's
not already resolved the problemThis is the problem with using
packet writing software to copy data to a CD... it works fine
on the same PC, but when you move to another one you can't always
read them. It's always better to copy data to the CD using normal
CD-Writing software such as Nero or Adaptec Easy CD etc. These
programs write the data to the
CD in a standard format that should be able to be read from any
PC. Anyway.. to get around the problem, you can do a number of
things.
Copy
the data back on to the in 98 PC & then re-write it to a new
CD using Nero etc (not packet writing ie.. drag & dropping
in explorer).
If you have ethernet cards in both PCs, you could copy the files
across the network.
Copy the files on to a USB memory stick or external hard drive
& then move the stick or drive to the new PC.
If Harry wants to contact me, please pass on these details:
email: chris.tapsell@ntlworld.com
Regards,
Chris Tapsel
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