I am trying to get a Packard Bell Pentium 150 upgraded from Windows 95 to Windows 98 SE to talk to my PowerShot S10. It works fine with the serial port. I cannot get the USB interface to work at all. The box says that the USB interface only works with a clean install of Windows 98. Can anyone explain this. Is there anything I can do to get the USB to work ?

Thanks

-- Richard Cue (RichardCue@compuserve.com), December 26, 1999

Answers

Ok, here is the fun part. When USB first came out, some companies put it into there machines before it became standardized. I believe this is the case with your Computer. I have two possibilities for you. 1. Buy a USB port card and disable the onboard USB. This might fix things. 2. Because of the age of your PC, forget USB and buy a Parallel port Card Reader.

-- David Erskine (davide@netquest.com), December 26, 1999.

As far as I know, both from surfing and some personal experiences, USB is a no-go proposition with Win95, probably still a losing one with Win 95B, and apparently a sometimes to most-times successful one with Win98.

I'm not sure about your USB hardware being so old that it's non-functional, but I suppose it's possible. However, to date my experience has been that older machines with non-functional USB hardware tend to mess a WIN98 install up to the point where you have to start up in safe mode and go into the device manager and manually disable the USB port. Matter of fact, I had to disable USB on the laptop I'm writing this on after I installed WIN98[Not a big deal since some of the hardware was there, but the manufacturer neglected to provide the physical ports on the machines-a slightly obvious clue as to why it wouldn't finish booting when I spotted USB in the device manager... :-)]. You didn't mention anything like that happening to you...

The first thing I'd do is try contacting the manufacturer and asking if USB can be made to function properly on your model if WIN98SE is installed. You may or may not get a straight answer, but if they say it'll work, it probably can be done. In most cases where updates are made beyond the hardware or software that came with machine and the update doesn't work they'll tell you so since they have no obligation to make your update work as long as your machine originally worked as advertised. Frankly, they often don't want to be bothered about updates they don't offer because of hardware problems they already know about.

Perhaps you need to go into the device manager and see if your USB port has an exclamation mark next to it indicating a problem? If so, you might try changing settings or removing it from the device manager and rebooting to see if Win 98 can then re-install it. You may have a hardware confict and need to change the resources that USB "wants to use".

If none of that is effective you could back up your hard drive or at least all the data files you really need from it and then reformat your drive and do a clean Win98 install. Beware that reformatting is irreversable and will destroy all the current data on the drive. It may be better to have someone who does PC work for a living take care of it for you. They may even have further insight into getting USB to work on your machine.

Good Luck!

-- Gerald Payne (gmp@francorp.francomm.com), December 27, 1999.