The Bleeding Edge - USB and FireWire

The Bleeding Edge - USB and FireWire

USB High Speed USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports are steadily replacing serial, parallel, and PS/2 ports, making Plug 'n' Play a reality, and if you believe the hype, making installation of printers, mice, keyboards, scanners, etc. a snap. Same with FireWire, the sexy name for the IEEE 1394 Serial Bus (1394b is coming up, and is reported to be very fast). Hmmm. As Win 98/ME, Win 2K, and Win XP bring USB into their folds, USB will become more and more prevalent. (Already most PCs and laptops come equipped with USB ports, as do most desktop PCs.) It won't supplant the other connections just yet, but don't be surprised if by, say, 2003, the only non-USB ports out there will be on older machines. USB conversion kits by Belkin, ADS, Entrega, and others work to quickly convert your older pc into a USB-ready machine. (Want to know if the computer you're about to buy has a USB slot? Check the back. If you see what looks like two coin-slots for fat nickels and a logo that looks like the cherries on a slot machine, you're looking at a USB port.) Check out USBReady, a free utility to test your USB port, and learn more about USB, at www.usb.org/ (grab the utility from www.usb.org/usbready.exe). Right now, USB ports are best known for supporting "force-feedback" joysticks, but that's just the tip of this particular iceberg. Another use for USB ports: a converter kit connecting multiple serial and parallel port devices through a single USB port. Warning: Current USB ports may not end up working at all. Why? Before the USB Consortium agreed on a standard, many manufacturers jumped the gun and installed their own versions of USB ports. Are they all compatible with every USB peripheral out there? Hah. If you've already bought a USB-ported PC and it doesn't seem to work, it may be toggled off in the BIOS. Have your dealer walk you through toggling it on. And, scanners seem to be having particular trouble getting along with USB. But these are all growing pains. Once USB and its to-be partner FireWire get situated (and dovetail with Windows), the PC world will never be the same. As for FireWire (now being labeled HPSB for High Performance Serial Bus), at this writing very few PCs feature this particular port (although lots of Macs do), and fewer peripherals are available. Why? So many flavors, offshoots, and tweaks of the original protocol are out there that Microsoft has been leery about making Windows 1394-compliant, but that is about to change. But look for FireWire to appear on a new computer near you, particularly after Intel starts building 1394 support into its chips and Microsoft decides to quit stalling and support it. All of this sound too wonky to make you care? Wait until you get used to using USB and FireWire ports, then come back and complain. Meanwhile, start looking for "Device Bays" to appear on new PCs, incorporating both USB and FireWire connectors, and used for "hot-swapping" hard drives, DVD and CD-ROM drives, etc. All this is bringing us closer to the time where we can install, or uninstall, any peripheral without cracking the case or even rebooting the computer. Want more info? Check out the info available at www.cpu-central.com/, www.tomshardware.com/, and www.device-bay.org/ Warning: Win 95 can't handle USB technology very well at all, so if you're looking to use USB-compliant accessories or peripherals, you're looking to upgrade. A very few peripheral devices function under Win 95 OSR 2.1, but that's about it. Having trouble making your USB peripherals work? Try your motherboard's Web site for a possible OS or BIOS-level patch, or check with the peripheral manufacturer for possible incompatibility problems (older chips from Cyrix and AMD seem to be particularly plagued with USB-compliancy problems). And don't expect the average Win 95 or NT setup to support USB; only Win 95B SR 2.1 supports USB, and it doesn't support it very well. Besides, most USB devices require Win 98/ME, or 2K/XP to run properly, not any version of Win 95. You want USB, you upgrade to Win 98, ME, 2K, or XP. Find out more at www.usb.org/.

New on the scene: USB 2.0, a new set of specs that finally came out in late 2000. Co-developed by Intel, Lucent, Philips, Microsoft, and Compaq, USB 2 runs as much as 40 times faster than the original USB specs (derided as too slow by many users), and possibly faster than the IEEE/FireWire connections. Right now the new format was supposed to have made it to shelves by late 2001 in one form or another (whether on chipsets or with add-in boards and USB 2-compliant devices), but as we wind through 2002, it's just now hitting the market, mostly in Intel chipsets. Most observers believe that USB 2 will quickly supplant the original USB specs. At 40 times the speed of the original USB, we can see why. The new standard provides additional bandwidth for multimedia and storage applications and also offers plug-and-play capability and full backward compatibility for legacy USB devices. 2.0 includes everything that USB 1.1 offers and adds a high-speed mode, which runs at 480Mbps. 1.1 supports two speed modes (1.5 and 12Mbps), whereas USB 2.0 has three of them: 1.5, 12, and 480Mbps. (By comparison, FireWire runs at 400Mbps, and the new version should move at twice that speed.) 2.0 also uses the same 1.1 compliant cables to connect high-speed devices. However, classic USB hubs will slow down 2.0 devices. A 2.0 host controller is required to enable the high-speed connection with a USB 2.0 device. Plugging a USB 1.1 device to a USB 2.0 hub is fine, but connecting a USB 2.0 device to a USB 1.1 hub won't work. 1.1 devices won't run any faster on a 2.0 hub, but they can work alongside 2.0 devices on the same bus. USB 2.0 won't replace 1.1 because many products such as generic keyboards, mice, joysticks, and audio speakers do not require the faster speed of the new technology. It costs about $80 to $150 to upgrade from 1.1 to 2.0. To confirm which you have, press WinKey + Pause/Break. This will open the System window. It will be located under different tabs in the different versions of Windows (for example, it's under Hardware in XP), but what you're looking for is the Device Manager. Under Device Manager, look for Universal Serial Bus. If there is no "Enhanced" USB Controller, you have the older USB 1.1.

The marketing folks have renamed the two flavors of USB. USB 1.1 is now USB Full Speed, and USB 2.0 is now USB High Speed (or Hi-Speed). If a manufacturer passes the USB compliance test for either standard (and ponies up $1500), they can display the "Certified USB" logo on their products. The USB 2.0/High Speed logo is shown at the beginning of this article. To make things that much more confusing, the logo license also refers to USB 2.0/High Speed as "Basic Speed," and there are references to "Low Speed USB" as well. Sheesh. Nevertheless, by the end of 2002, most if not all new PCs will be USB 2.0-compliant.

PC manufacturers seem to be backing away from FireWire in favor of Serial ATA interface technology, partially because every use of FireWire technology requires a royalty payment to Apple. Some pundits are reversing themselves and are now predicting that FireWire's association with PCs may be done before it starts; then again, FireWire seems to have a hammerlock on digital video and video-editing connections, so don't look for it to dry up and blow away. Keep up with FireWire technology at www.askfor1394.com/. FireWire cards for PCs are cheap, but not particularly common.

Note: Win 98/ME has a known flaw that makes it sometimes fail to connect with USB devices every time around. Sometimes turning off the PC, unplugging the device from the USB port and plugging it back after Windows is running, seems to work.

Win XP users sometimes have trouble with USB mice. The workaround is to disable the system's "USB Selective Suspend" property; find out how (as well as a hotfix from Microsoft) at support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q315664.

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