HI,
I have been asked by a friend to organise him an external hard drive for his PC. The issue we have is that he has USB, but not USB 2. So we need a PCI card or those file transfers will be painfully slow (he wants it for backup). I have some questions:

1 - What is recommended? I’ve seen PCI cards for £30 at Maplin, I assume you folk know better places to go for such things.

2 - I assume he will need drivers (guess what, he has no access to the internet, so drivers will have to be available for me to take to him), either is machine will know about USB 2, or we will need to get them from somewhere.

The machine in question is a Packard Bell iMedia 5064 (a 2002 vintage) running Windows XP Home. I am not sure if any of the most recent service packs have been applied to it. I expect that I’d have to get that updated somehow.

A new machine is not on the cards at the moment, before anyone suggests he should buy something new.

This should do it for you.
Drivers will be in the box but I doubt you'll need them.

You'll need to be at service pack 2 (IIRC) for usb2 to work.

HI,
thanks - I’ll let him know. That’s certainly a good price - I think he’d go for that. The prices on the site seem pretty keen too. I may snaffle up a hard drive for the PS3 from them at some stage.

Play.com do one for less than a fiver delivered: Clicky.
I can't vouch one way or the other for it, however. I've got a couple of Belkin cards in the Macs, and they're fine.

I was thinking the same thing the other day when I saw a 120gb drive for £30

HI,
I’ve told my friend (it’s a bit of a long distance conversation - he’s a bit house bound after a leg operation) and he’s interested - but he did ask about the blanking plate on the back of his machine - from what it sounds like he has a metal plate covering the spare PCI slots. I reckon we could swap the existing USB 1 card for the USB2 one and be done with it, but in case we can’t do this, I presume we can get some blanking plates to cover any unused ports?

The alst time I did anything like tis was fitting podules to my Acorn Archimedes. I had blanking plates for those.

?

There should be blanking plates on any unused ports, why after adding a card (& removing one of the plates) would there be more holes?

I can send you blanking plates if he's that worried about it.