usb ports

I bought this from amazon.com with great expectations. After installing it, however, I found to my dismay that it didn't work with USB 2.0 devices - the system would lock up every time it tried to send data to my USB 2 device (Lexar USB2 Multi-Card Reader)! My old mouse based on USB 1.1 worked just fine, but not the USB 2 card reader. After 3 hours of struggling and research online I finally found the problem. Apparently, windows xp originally does not support USB 2.0, only in Service Pack 1 this becomes available. Since I was running XP without SP1, I had to rely on the drivers that came with this card. However, these drivers for the NEC chipset (on which this card is based) are v.2.0.7, and they appear to be buggy. After a lengthy search online I found the drivers v.2.0.8 - installed them and now the card works just great. It clocks ~3.1MB/s download and ~2.8MB/s upload with my Lexar Multi-Card reader. Unfortunately, this is the only device I have to test its speed with, but it works great so far! I'm giving it 4 stars, because the installation was so long and complicated - besides, Keyspan's website did not have the updated drivers, which is a shame...

So if you buy this card and if you're running WinXP without SP1, make sure you download v.2.0.8 drivers for NEC USB 2.0 chipsets. Here's a link: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/allcam/drivers/necusb2.exe

FYI: I'm running WinXP on HP OmniBook XE3, 256RAM, 1066Mhz Pentium III.

Thought I'd write this up, since there were no other reviews
as 11/2003 (and because I found other's reviews extremely
helpful).

The Keyspan 2.0 Cardbus 2port USB 2.0 card installed
perfectly on my Dell Inspiron 4100, running Windows XP.
Windows found all drivers necessary; I did not have to
install drivers from the included CD-ROM.

Data seemed to transfer at a fine rate to/from my new
Lexar Media 2.0 JumpDrive Pro.
I do not have the tools to benchmark performance,
but it seemed to exceed the performance of my old
SCSI Jaz drive attached to a 16-bit SCSI PCMCIA card.

So far so good! If it toasts I'll review this review!