add USB card to old ASUS mobo?

[Felix]

Hi gang,

my home computer used to work pretty fine, however, resetted from time to time. Suddenly, after exactly 5 years, the resets increased so that it was even impossible to fully boot win98se so I decided to get the hard drive out & transplant it to another system, to save the time for the reinstall. The transplant worked flawlessly, and the "new" computer works very fine so far!

The "old" comp was a matsonic mobo with ali aladdin V chipset, and Cyrix PR-266 processor, and 32 to 544 MB RAM (make your choice...). It worked usually fine, but gave me troubles accidentally from the first day (I bought it new). Good side is, it had USB on board, so I hooked an USB scanner to it.

The "new" computer is the famous ASUS P/I-P55T2P4 mobo with pentium 200MHz processor, and 128MB RAM; I've got it for free from my job.

Both are actually still fast enough for surfin the web by modem, or for typin a letter or such common home office stuff.

Here the problem comes: The ASUS mobo has no USB built-in. So I wanted to buy an USB add-on card, but heck! There are two flavours (USB 2.0 with VIA chipset, and USB 1.1 with OPTI chipset), which it seems both require PCI 2.1 standard, which the ASUS mobo also doesn't support, as it looks.

There is no support either since ASUS discontinued support for that board.

Conclusion: I have an old puter and want to add USB by using an USB add-on card. But I can find only new USB add-on cards. which don't fit to old puters; they fit only to new puters which actually don't need any add-on card.

Did I miss something? Thanks to everyone for any clue.

Take care,
Felix

[ZYFER]

the Asus mobo does in fact support PCI 2.1 according to this webpage here:

http://www.asus.com.tw/support/engli...0hx/index.aspx

[Force Flow]

I'm not sure what you exactly mean by an "add-on card", but what I think you may want to look at are PCI USB cards.

[Felix]

thank you Zyfer for the link; that's what I forwarded to the card manufacturer's poor support.

In the meantime I've got a spare card from the dealer; great service. however it did not work either, so there's sometin' wrong anyway.

Maybe best bet is, put the USB scanner (slow HP 3500) to ebay, and get an aged SCSI scanner out of ebay... Big effort, but maybe overall a good solution, with increased performance... what do you think?

Thanx again,
Felix

[ZYFER]

which USB PCI cards have you used?

[Felix]

Exsys EX-1072 (USB 2)
http://www.exsys.ch/english/ex_1072/ex_1072.html

Exsys EX-1052 (USB 1.1) would give the same troubles, according to spec, (since even the recognition of the card within the comp is a problem)
http://www.exsys.ch/english/ex_1052/ex_1052.html

[Felix]

what I can add... Hummm... yes, it's a small manufacturer, however the card is wide spread in german spoken european mail order shops. I feel that even it is a generic card, it's common hardware. there's notin but the opti, respectively via chip on the board

there's an usb card from adaptec, too; however they not even mention PCI spec on their website

Felix

[ZYFER]

you are right the adaptec site does not specify, you can email them and find out if it will work. they are really proffessional about these things.