USB/Firewire HD question on older systems

[kjliew]

Both USB and firewire support in Win98/SE is crippled. I will not even touch them unless I have Win2K and onwards.

The USB driver stack in Win98/SE does not support storage class. WinME has it though, but I have never put any of my system in WinME. (If I were to put my system back to stone age OS, I would have to have DOS. WinME just doesn't make sense.) storage class driver for Win98SE-only is provided by individual manufacturer of the storage class peripherals. Some (cheap/lazy) manufacturers doesn't provide such driver though. (They expect you to have at least Win2k.)

For firewire storage class device, you need to get a special QFE from Micro$oft to get it to work correctly.

In a nutshell, to get the best experience out of firewire and USB peripherals, get Win2k or XP.

[UtwigMU]

I would get Win2k on the box - he'll be thankful - and PCI card for hard drive.

I would also move other hard drives to PCI card (Promise seem to have least hassles) and hook optical drives alone on channels of motherboard controller.

I did this for one person - upgraded his PII 300/LX 64MB box to 196MB RAM, added burner, formatted, installed Win2k, transfered e-mail, documents and reinstalled his apps.

Worked perfectly untill he disabled firewall and surfed pr0n sites with IE instead of Mozilla and he contracted about 10 viruses and about 100 or so spyware items.

But even with that bloat, the box still ran, just ungodly slow.

[Kurt]

A P-II, 128MB RAM and a fast HDD are all it takes (of course more RAM is better). It won't be a speed champ but it won't be slow.

[Helevitia]

I think I am just going to add another HDD to his existing system and tell him the limitations. I don't want to make a project out of it. I'll probably add an 80GB HDD and hope it recognizes the whole thing.

Thanks for your help everyone

Dave