Upgrade Laptop USB from 1.1 to 2.0
 

I have an old HP ze4500 that I would like to start using as a mythtv frontend/remote backend. Unfortunately, it has the old USB 1.1 ports which are too slow for this work. I see that there are a number of cardbus USB 2.0 adapter cards out there. Do they generally work, or should I look for a specific card? I am using Debian Squeeze, but I am not squeamish about compiling kernels. This laptop is running version 3.8.3 from kernel.org, seemingly without problems at this point.

I imagine that any PCMCIA that will be supported, already is supported, if you get my meaning. So I would grab something cheap online and see what happens.

Yeah, that's what I figured; given that this isn't new technology. =) I'll give it a try. Thanks.

I picked up a couple of these for around $4.50 a piece
a few years ago from a china seller. They came with a usb 1.1 power cable for powering
external drives that were power hungry like external cdroms and such.

The linux kernels nowadays picks them up just fine on my IBM a22m laptop and IBM T23 laptop just fine. All the ports work, even firewire.

I don't know what they sell for now though.

I'd be more squeamish about trying any pc card anymore. Most of that stuff vanished when usb came out. Some of my tests long ago were both card support but also how the internal slot was connected to the motherboard. Some of the older IBM's were better choices in my limited tests as they used pcmcia for some internal stuff.

Lucky for you the cards seem to be cheap enough.

Might be worth it to consider a faster newer system also. If usb 1 I'd think the entire system would be kind of pokey.

Well, I ordered an unopened HP adapter off of ebay. If it doesn't work, then OK. The laptop has an AMD Athlon XP 1.86GHz processor, so it should be fast enough to do what I need if I can get the USB issue settled.

Then I hope it works perfectly for you.

Let us know if it works.

What model did you buy?

From the listing, it's: "HP 2-Port USB 2.0 Cardbus Adapter,Hot swappable,w/ Power Supply - New,Sealed" If it works with the easycap dongle I have, then I'll probably get a Haupaugge USB Video Capture device and swap it in for my noisy desktop. It's either that, or get a small form factor silent system for which the budget doesn't exist at the moment.

I thought I'd follow this up and mark it as solved. The PCMCIA card turns out to be an HP PM453A; also known as microinv model number BU2220N2. It worked great after I recompiled the kernel with pcmcia turned on. Even the easycap 60 works. Now for a decent capture dongle.

Thanks for the help and encouragement!

Thanks for the report. Good going.