USB Devices

USB DRIVERS AND DEVICES

  Techies inside your pc copywright ©2000

What's USB?

The USB communications channel represents a new connection standard championed by Microsoft, Intel, Compaq, and other prominent industry players. Basically, USB ports, as shown in Figure A, will eventually replace all the port connectors now found on the back of your computer. You'll be able to connect keyboards, mice, joysticks, scanners, printers, monitors, digital cameras, telephones, modems, and an assortment of other devices to your computer via the USB port. In fact, USB will allow you to daisy chain up to 127 devices from a single port.

The power of USB

The USB channel pumps a lot more through the cable than just data; it also supplies a 5-volt power line to the peripherals connected to it.

So, USB will do away with the many cables used to connect peripheral devices to the system and eliminate the multitude of power cables dangling from the back of your desk to the power supply.

Figure A:

Figure A: USB ports will eventually replace the traditional communications ports on the back of your system.

The best feature of USB communications channel is that it's hot swappable. In other words, USB works very much like the current Plug-and-Play system, but on the outside of your computer, allowing you to add and remove devices without powering down or reconfiguring the computer. When a new device is added or removed, Windows 98 automatically detects the change and then loads or unloads the appropriate driver.

The speed of USB

When compared to parallel and serial ports, USB ports provide incredibly fast communication channels between your PC and the peripheral devices. In fact, USB has two data transmission speeds: 1.5Mb per second (Mbps) for lower-end devices (such as keyboards, mice, and joysticks) and 12Mbps for higher-end devices (such as scanners, printers, monitors, and modems). To help you put this into perspective, 12Mbps is comparable to the transmission speed of a 10BaseT Ethernet network. A further advantage of having two data-transmission speeds is that lower-end devices only use the bandwidth that they need and won't hog bandwidth that the higher-end devices need.

ONE CONNECTOR FITS ALL
Another area where the "universal" in USB is good news for consumers regards the connector itself. Now you only have one type to deal with. In the past, computer users have had to deal with a bewildering assortment of serial, parallel, SCSI and game port connectors. Each had a different number of pins, and on some, the male-female configurations of the plugs and jacks were reversed from others.

This confusion, combined with aforementioned IRQ settings and drivers, made the entire process of adding peripherals such an ordeal that many people decided it wasn't worth the hassle. That prompted many of the computer industry's major players - including Microsoft, Compaq, Intel, and IBM--to cooperate in developing USB. One of the goals was to come up with a computer connection that could be as universal as the standard wall socket.