I recently purchased a USB 2.0 card. It is a startech 4-port USB 2.0 PCI card. The model number is PCI425USB. I installed the card, with updated drivers from the site, and everything seemed to be working fine, until windows booted. When all of the start up programs were starting I recieved many errors. The one that I remember, and the most serious one, is that windows registry encountered and error and that i had to reboot to fix it. I rebooted and got trapped in an endless cycle of this. In the end I removed the card and everything worked fine. I would like to be able to use the card and that is why i came to you guys. Any help would be greatly appreciated. O ya and i forgot to say that i am using windows 98SE.
If you can, go to device manager without rebooting and check your card. It may be that its having an IRQ conflict, so see if device manager tells anything about it.
Do you have the original drivers for your device? Try using them rather then the latest. Windows 98 is an old operating system and most new drivers aren't 100% compatible. Also, your USB card looks very cheap (no offence of course), i've bought some very cheap USB 2.0 cards before, and they are nothing but trouble, believe me! I ended up returning mine and buying a more expensive card which worked! I'd recommend you buy a card with an NEC chipset, something by Belkin. I'm using it in Windows 98 with no problems at all. Oh, and i almost forgot, don't buy VIA USB cards, they'll make your life a living hell....
I tried installing from the CD but it doesnt work. I get some kind of error when it is installing the drivers, and it is an .exe file so i have to do it when windows is all fired up, not when it detects new hard ware. I couldnt check the device manager because when the card is in the system window wont boot because explorer gets an illegal operation error. I dont know if this was a cheap card or not, but i paid $40 plus tax for it
Take your USB card out and turn on your computer. Just before the OS loads press F8 and then select safe mode. Go into Device manager and uninstall everything related to USB - even your motherboards USB sockets. Important: you must uninstall in this order. 1. Any external USB device such as Flash Drive, ipod etc 2. Uninstall the USB Root Hubs. 3. Uninstall the USB controllers 4. Uninstall the enhanced USB controllers. Then restart your computer with the USB card installed. When you load into the operating system, it will redetect all of your USB. If you still have problems, you need to find out whether it is the enhanced drivers that are causing it. Try disabling the enhanced driver. This will make the card USB 1.1 temporarily. If your computer runs with no problems, this means a bad enhanced USB driver. If this is the case, right click 'enhanced Host controller' and click update driver. Select search for a driver manually and press next. Then select show only compatible drivers. You should see a list of compatible drivers. Try switching between them to see which one works best.
