Saturday, March 08, 2003 - 12:00 a.m. Pacific
Q&A / Patrick Marshall
USB 2.0 port will run USB 1.1 device just fine
Q. I have a 4-year-old Dell Dimension with an internal USB 1.1 card with two ports. Will changing this card to a USB 2.0 card with four ports speed up downloading music from my hard drive to my portable MP3 player, synching with my Palm PDA, and uploading images from my digital camera?
— J. Geller
A. Unfortunately, USB 1.1 devices won't run any faster on USB 2.0, also known as USB Hi-Speed. USB 1.0 devices have a maximum speed of 12 megabits per second, while USB 2.0 devices have a top speed of 480 megabits per second, or 40 times as fast as USB 1.1.
The good news is that USB 2.0 port will run your USB 1.1 device just fine. And it does offer one advantage: You'll be able to daisy-chain more USB devices on the port before you max out the port's bandwidth.
By the way, keep in mind that if you have a USB 1.1 hub and you connect it to a USB 2.0 port, you'll be slowing everything connected to that hub down to USB 1.1 speeds. And you won't be able to connect a USB 2.0 device to a USB 1.1 port or hub.
If you want to learn more about USB, you might want to visit www.everythingusb.com.
Q. My Dell L550r PC has only a 4 gigabyte hard disk. I use this PC for my business and have no music or games. However, I have only 475 MB of space free. I have Windows 98. I have 766 files that have extension *.tmp or *.TMP. A lot of these are in Windows/Temp or MS Internet Explorer folders. Someone said I can delete all these files. Can I do this without fear of losing files that I need to run programs?
I also have files like Win386.swp. This must be coming from my older PC that was 386 upgraded to 486.
— Umesh Nisargand
A. As a rule, TMP files are automatically deleted when you close Windows. If Windows closes abnormally, however, TMP have to be deleted manually. If the file is currently in use, you'll receive a message saying so. Otherwise, zap the sucker!
If you eventually upgrade to Windows XP, you'll find a utility called Disk Cleanup that makes it a snap to reclaim disk space from unneeded files.
As for the Win386.swp file, I'd recommend against deleting it. Despite the 386 in the name, the file is the Windows 98 swap file, where the operating system stores information during a session.
Q. In Internet Explorer, Web sites kept under My Favorites are automatically stored in alphabetic order. How do I change that to order them by their creation date?
— James Verson
A. There is no way to sort items automatically by date entered. The only auto-sort option is alphabetic. You can, however, manually rearrange your favorites by dragging them with your mouse and, so long as you don't select the auto-sort option, the favorites will stay where you put them.
Q. We have a new Dell 8250 with Windows XP and have installed Outlook 2002 for e-mail. There are three users on the computer, all of whom share the same ISP provider and the same e-mail address. We are used to having the same Outlook screen and sharing e-mail information irrespective of who is logged on. Now each user downloads e-mail (some of which is meant for other users) and this is unavailable to the others unless they log on as the downloading user to see the messages. How can we tweak Outlook so that we all see the same e-mail?
— Dana Stiner
A. Hmmm. That one is tough, since Microsoft understandably designed separate logons to use separate Outlook files. You can share an inbox among several users if you're using a Microsoft Exchange e-mail server, but I'm not aware of any way to accomplish this if you're using an Internet-service provider as your mail server. My suggestion: If you all trust each other enough to share the same e-mail inbox, why not share the same logon and user profile?
Questions for Patrick Marshall may be sent by e-mail to pmarshall@seattletimes.com or pgmarshall@pgmarshall.net, or by mail at Q&A/Technology, The Seattle Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.
Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company
