USB (additional ports) question...

[pawhe]

I have a system based on a (circa 2001) MSI motherboard which has 2 x USB1.1
ports built in. All of my external USB devices work fine either directly to
the ports, or via a 4-port USB1.1 hub attached to one of the ports. Once the
attached/external devices USB drivers have been installed, I have moved the
position of the external device around at will (i.e. from hub to direct
port, etc.) with no issues or surprises.

For expansion and higher-speed, I have installed a (Belkin) 5 port USB2.0
PCI card. Installation o.k., XP(SP2) recognised card and installed
appropriate drivers. To make sure it was working, I unplugged one of my
external devices from the built-in USB1.1 port, and plugged it into a USB2.0
port on the new card. I was surprised when XP then announced that it had
discovered "new hardware", and proceeded to want to (re-?)install the
specific USB drivers for the external device (e.g. WinTV USB, which XP would
not have built in drivers for, and which are supplied by the vendor, with
the device).

I expected to be able to simply moved my external devices around between the
1.1 and the 2.0 ports at will, without having to re-install drivers - e.g.
USB was plug and play (to the extreme). It means serious hassle if I want to
experiment plugging the external devices into the available ports in various
combinations to find the best set-up.

Can anyone verify that the above is "normal" behaviour for two USB
installations (e.g. motherboard and expansion card) in the same machine?

Thanks,

 

[Yves Leclerc]

This happened to me. It seems that the drivers need to be asociated to the
group of USB 1.1 ports. The drivers were correctly installed to the MSI USB
and now needed to be installed to Belkin USB 1.1 ports.

NOTE: This does not mean that any USB 1.1 device now will be doing USB 2.0.