Quote:
Originally Posted by devilsadvocate
If you don't mind my asking, what card was that, so I know to avoid it?
|
It's a CompUSA branded PCMCIA USB 2.0 adapter, providing two USB 2.0 ports.
The actual manufacturer CompUSA OEMed it from is Sabrent, at
http://www.sabrent.com/#
The price is right: about $20, and performance is okay when proper drivers are loaded. Getting the proper drivers was a chore.
Quote:
|
I have an old lappy with USB1.1 native and was looking at just such an upgrade in an attempt to squeeze that last bit of usefulness out of it.
|
How old, and what sort of specs?
Mine is a Fujitsu Lifebook from 2002. 867mhz Transmeta "Crusoe" CPU, 256MB of RAM, and 40GB UDMA 4 Fujitsu HD with an 18MB/Sec xfer rate. The person who gave it to me said it was "slow slow slow". No surprise: it came from Fujitsu with WinXP Pro SP2 on it, and XP wants 512MB minimum. Booted from XP, it did a good imitation of mainframe "death by thrashing", as it spent more time swapping than doing useful work.
I replaced the original Toshiba 30GB HD with a Fujitsu from my SO's dead laptop, repartitioned, and installed Win2K Pro, Xubuntu 9.10, and Puppy Linux.
Win2K is painfully slow, and only there for the occasions I simply must use Windows. Xubuntu was snail slow. Puppy had an upgrade that supported ext4, so I wiped the Ubuntu and Puppy partitions, redid them as ext 4, then installed the Puppy upgrade, and installed Ubuntu from MinimalCD to get a bare bones command line setup, then installed Xfce4 and applications with apt-get. The Ubuntu result is not a speed demon, but is usable.
Puppy is pretty sprightly, designed for lower end hardware, and the bundled apps are fairly quick, but third party stuff like Firefox or Open Office is taxing. Performance when up is bearable, but loading can take 30 seconds to a minute. (It's about a third better than it was under ext3, however - moving to ext4 was worth it.)
I just spent an hour or so using ndiswrapper to load some of the other windows drivers that came with it. LAN speed seems better, for instance. (I connect at home with a CAT5 cable directly to my router.)
I could theoretically do some upgrades, adding more RAM (Fujitsu claims it can take up to 384MB with a 128MB add-on, but there's a 256MB add-on available.) and a faster HD, but this is mostly an experiment to see what sort of performance I can wring out of it
without spending money.
______
Dennis