PCMCIA combo card trouble

[Tabularasa]

Howdy forum,
I'll get to it: I have a PCMCIA combo card (2 USB 2.0 ports and 2 Firewire ports). I have 7200 RPM external WD HD (80GB). HD works good with card and all. I can copy files to the HD through the USB 2 port.
Then I ran into trouble. I'm trying to download video from my camcorder to the external HD and my Pinnacle Studio 8 software tells me that the "data transfer rate is below the necessary 4444 kb/sec. Grrrr. I can download the video fine to my internal HD but I want more space. HD is fine because I tested it (with same software & camcorder) on another laptop that has built-in USB 2.0. This leads me to believe that the USB 2.0 ports on my PCMCIA card are screwed. Been working on this for a few days now guys and I'm torked. Any help would be great.

A few specs on my comp: Compaq Presario 906us
XP Home SP1
Mobile AMD Athlon XP 1500+
The combo Cardbus PC Card is made by "I/O Flex" a division of Koutech.

Thanks,
Tab

[hudsonsmith]

Welcome to WinDrivers Tab. There have been many issues w/ usb2 and firewire cards, and some of them may just boil down to incompatible hardware. In any case:

1. Do the usb ports/controller show up in device manager as usb 2.0?

2. Compaq shows a ROM update (F.0B) which supposedly addresses cardbus performance issues. Do you have this installed? http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/s...0009798&os=228

3. Your computer has an ALi chipset. I would confirm that you have the latest chipset drivers. http://www.aliusa.com/eng/support/support_driver.htm

4. Confirm that you have the latest drivers for the combo card. http://www.koutech.com/downloads.asp

All that said, is the camcorder connecting via the firewire port? Since you can download from the camcorder to the internal hd, there may be a routing issue going in on the firewire and back out on the usb2 through the same card.

[Tabularasa]

Ok,
Thanks for the info.
1 & 4. The usb ports don't show up as usb 2.0 in the dev.manager after the initial installation. I have downloaded the most recent driver from Koutech. I also went in and changed the driver to USB 2.0 (driver wasn't signed) and now the ports do register and USB 2.0 ports.

2. I have no idea if I have the ROM update. How do I tell that? If I don't, then which one should I pull (there are 2 "F.0B" at the compaq site).

3. I have been trying all day to get to the ALi website to download the most recent drivers, but no luck. Will keep trying.

Yes, my camcorder is linked to the firewire port on the card. Like you said, it does just fine going to the internal HD, but cant go out to the external HD (which is on the USB 2. port of the card)
I will look into the other stuff and keep trying on the ALi site.
-Tab

[hudsonsmith]

Both ROM updates are the same. One creates a disk, the other is bundled with a Windows flash utility. The ROM revision can be determined by running the Setup Utility by pressing F10 on the target computer during start up.

The ALi site is back up. You want the Integrated Driver

[Tabularasa]

Hud,
took a while but I finally got all the drivers and updated everything. Still no dice. Any thoughts on what else I could do?
-Tab

[hudsonsmith]

You said you can't go from the camcorder to the external hard drive. What happens if you go from the internal hard drive to the external hard drive? Use the Performance Monitor to determine your throughput. [Performance Object is Physical Disk. Select the counter for Disk Write Bytes/sec.]