I’ve been wanting to add some USB 2.0 ports to my desktop for quite a while now, and after saving up some hard earned allowance money I picked up an IOGear 5 port USB PCI card from Amazon.com. Go to stick it in the computer, and thanks to the extra-wide graphics card, I discover there’s no more room for another card. There’s still an available PCI slot, but it’s rendered unusable by the graphics card.
Crap. That means I have to take something out. There’s the modem, but that’s got to stay (at least until I decide I want to shell out for broadband). Soundcard…well I’d like to keep that around. IDE controller…got the big hard drive attached to that, so it has to stay. That leaves the video capture card. Since I have no TV/VCR/DVD to feed into the card yet, it’s not doing much at the moment. Sucks to lose the Firewire port on it though, but it’s the most expendable card right now so out it comes.
9 USB ports on board (4 USB 1.0, 4 USB 2.0, 1 internal USB 2.0) should give me plenty of expansion room for now I figure.
Next on my upgrade wish list is one of these and maybe some RDRAM. That should keep my system usable for a few more years.
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