David Lock

I want to buy a digital camera with a USB 2.00 connection for someone who has an old PC which may only have a USB 1.00 port.

Will it work?

dl

Aaron1978

iTrader: (12)

Yes it will be fine, it just means that it supports USB 2.0 but will still work fine on 1.0 just slower.

Aaron

brendy76

iTrader: (6)

A LOT slower. Unusable almost for large file transfers. If possible buy a pci USB 2.0 card to go along with it.

David Lock

OK thanks guys.

This will be for viewing piccies on memory card used in camera. speed not really an issue (within reason).

What is a pci card, where does it go and are they expensive?

Cheers, David

andys

Something like

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...odid=CC-000-BE

need to make sure their computer has a spare pci slot round the back

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Seriously, if its a desktop/tower PC throw a fiver at it and fit a PCi USB2.0 card. It should be just a case of taking the cover off, and fitting it into a free slot.

USB1.0 is like 12Mbits (well more like 10Mbits once all the overheads are added in)....You can get faster internet connections!

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Yup. USB 2.0 is about 480Mbits IIRC, thats 40 times faster!

To put that into perspective (which is handy to know for those using NAS boxes who wonder why it takes so long to transfer files); that is about five times faster than standard wired ethernet, nearly nine times faster than a standard 'wireless g' network, and about six times faster than the typical 'wireless n' network (even if wireless n is supposed to be 300Mbits, it rarely goes above 80Mbits in the real world).

Only gigabit wired ethernet, external SATA, firewire 800, thunderbolt (Apple) and USB3.0 tronces it.

The only thing I should warn about a upgrade card is just make sure it is supplied with a software driver compatible with the operating system (check the manufacturer's website if need be). For example if that old computer is still running windows 2000 or win 98 (which wouldn't suprise me) then that will be an issue. But windows XP onwards should be fine. And also not to mix up PCi and PCi-express (or PCI-E); The latter uses a much smaller slot which I doubt will fit in a such a old computer with USB1 ports, whereas the majority of computers (even current ones) still have a normal PCi slot.