is USB supported in W2k?

[k4 0]

I have a little "exclamation" mark beside the USB driver under device manager, does W2K support USB?

[APV_SAV 0]

yes w2k support usb, if you have the bp6 motherboard, flash to QQ bios will fix it

[Seldzar 0]

Um what is this qq bios your referring to? It's not on ABit's page that I've seen. Besides you DON"T need to flash your bios as the first thing to fix everything. First make sure your bios is set to 1.1mps or something to that effect(I'm not in the bios ya know =)Also ensure you have assign IRQ to usb set in your bios. If those don't work then remove the usb icon in your device manager and reboot.

 

[This message has been edited by Seldzar (edited 12 February 2000).]

[k4 0]

ok. thanks..

i thought you don't need to Hard-code an IRQ for USB in the bios for it to work... W98 doesn't need to do that to configure usb.. just a thought. Thanks guys!

 

apv: how'd you know i got bp6?

[Jerry - 0]

He knows when you are sleeping. He knows when you're awake.

[YuppieScum 0]

k4 - if you search the forum for "bp6" and "usb" you'll find any number of threads about the subject, along with solutions.

 

 

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SuperMicro P6DBS (dual UW-SCSI) BIOS 2.2, 2*Celery 300a @ 450Mhz, 384MB PC100 RAM

SCSI-A=4.3Gb+9Gb, SCSI-B=Tosh32x CD-ROM, Yamaha4416 CD-RW, Iomega ZIP100, IDE1=4.3Gb

IBM EtherJet 10/100 NIC PCI + Nortel ADSL "modem"

CL TNT1 AGP + Quantum3D Voodoo2 SLI PCI

SoundBlaster Live PCI (not Value)

Win2K build 2195 Retail (no 120-day eval)

[Robo_Grunt 0]

Unfortunately, Win98 and Win2000 uses totally different emulators for USB. That is why support is spotty right now. The drivers have to be totally rewritten. Totally. I think that win98 uses VXD's and win2000 uses something called VDM's(?). Not positive but I do know that emulation under win2000 is difficult. At least that's what driver authors are saying.

[YuppieScum 0]

Not quite the case.

 

USB drivers for devices are never VXDs, as installation of these file types can sometime require a reboot - bad for a hot-swappable port design. VXDs were (and are for Win9x) used to support the actual mobo USB port hardware.

 

In Windows 95, USB device drivers were just regular DLLs - and many vendors used extensive 16-bit code to support their USB products.

 

For Win98 (and Win2K) MS came up with the Windows Driver Model (WDM). This was a driver design "infrastructure" that would allow IHVs to write a single driver that work on both platforms - thereby kickstarting USB hardware support for the upcoming Win2K...

 

However, most IHV's couldn't be bothered to "follow the rules" and write to the new standard, because the old-school drivers would work under Win98 anyway, and they just didn't care about supporting Win2K.

 

This has nothing to do, however, with the original question - why doesn't the actual USB port work under Win2K.

 

The answer is that Win2K is a lot stricter about hardware conforming to defined standards. Where Win98 will let some compatability slide to get better "coverage" at the expense of stability, Win2K (and all the other revs of NT) are about stability first. In this specific case, Abit's USB implementation was a little flawed, and had to be fixed by a rev of the mobos BIOS.

 

Anyway, none of the above has anything to do with "emulation".

 

 

 

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SuperMicro P6DBS (dual UW-SCSI) BIOS 2.2, 2*Celery 300a @ 450Mhz, 384MB PC100 RAM

SCSI-A=4.3Gb+9Gb, SCSI-B=Tosh32x CD-ROM, Yamaha4416 CD-RW, Iomega ZIP100, IDE1=4.3Gb

IBM EtherJet 10/100 NIC PCI + Nortel ADSL "modem"

Matrox G400 DH 32Mb AGP + Quantum3D Voodoo2 SLI PCI (CL TNT1 AGP on a shelf)

SoundBlaster Live PCI (not Value)

Win2K build 2195 Retail (not 120-day eval)

[Robo_Grunt 0]

Thanks bro...you cleared that up for me. Now it makes sense. Well, hopefully they will get off their can and do it up right.

[EddiE314 0]

Hi All