Tips And Tricks With Old PC Hardware – Enabling USB

First I’ll answer the question of “Why should I bother?” concerning this article. The answer is simple. You save cash. I’ll explain how it saves you cash in a moment.

Chances are you’ve probably got an old computer lying around that you’d like to put to some use instead of doing nothing.

One reason why your old box is sitting and doing nothing is because it has USB 1.1 ports (which are excruciatingly slow) or none at all. This limits you to what you can do with it. But after enabling USB you can connect up just about anything to it. The U in USB truly means universal in that respect.

Even with the oldest crustiest PC box you have, you can enable USB on it – including a bootable device in replacement of a hard drive.

All it takes is the right hardware.

I’ll separate this into two sections. Old and Really Old.

Old

An old PC is one with USB 1.1 on it and it probably only has two ports. Possibly one. It has PCI slots in it, so the fix is easy. You buy a USB PCI card. These things are absolutely dirt cheap. You can opt to buy online or from your local electronics retailer (such as Best Buy in the USA).

Your ports will be located in the back of the PC box, but you can bring them to the front with the additional purchase of a USB hub, and that’s also cheap.

Once you have it all hooked up, which takes only minutes and no driver installation, you can plug in all the stuff you want to your heart’s content.

Really Old

A really old PC has no USB whatsoever. All you’ve got are ancient ISA slots which means absolutely no ability to boot from USB. Yes, there are in fact ISA slot USB cards available from EasySync Ltd, however you still can’t boot from that.

However, you do have an IDE ribbon-cable hard drive connector. A-ha! The fix for this is a nice cheap part, a SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 adapter. If you search NewEgg you will find this easily and it’s less than $25.

So even with dinosaur-era PCs, you can still enable USB on it – and boot from it as well.

Does this mean you could use a USB stick as the hard drive? Why yes, yes you could.

Operating System Considerations

You have a few choices for the OS you choose to run on old PCs.

The oldest version of Windows that has USB support is Windows 98. After that you have to jump straight to Windows 2000, then XP. Windows NT 4.0′s support is so-so to outright bad and I don’t recommend using that.

The problem with Windows is that it has a difficult time running off a USB stick/drive.

“Biz-card” sized Linux distributions will also work very well. The smallest of the small that come with a usable GUI are Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux. Both will run easily off a USB stick. In fact, you can download UNetbootin and it will format, partition and make a USB stick boot-ready for you. All it takes is a few clicks. It’s so easy that you don’t even need to download the OS; it does that for you too!

Ways using old PC boxes save you cash

At the end of the day it truly does not matter what computer box you have as long as it does what you want. There is absolutely no shame in taking an old Pentium II box with a 15-inch CRT monitor and doing your work on it. The only time you run into real issues is with web sites that use Flash. But Flash is optional and not required.

In addition, the reason your old PC box still works is for several reasons.

First, older boxes (OEMs anyway) were built with better cases.

Second, many didn’t run as hot as current ones do.

Third, the wiring is thicker and shielded better.

There are more reasons, but you get the idea.

The biggest reason to give this a go is because if it only takes less than $40 to make an old box work again, you should do it. That’s far cheaper than buying new, and you know it’s all going to work with minimal effort.