USBView

[A word of warning: USBView works on WinXP and will show both high and low speed devices.  It will only show the low speed devices on Win2K].  USBView is an alternative way of looking at the USB bus and can help to see if the devices are appearing on the bus as expected and communicating properly.  

At the end of this page is a screen shot of the USBView.exe utility when a dc3000 is connected to a PC. It is a shows a fairly standard 2-port PCMCIA/Cardbus card based on an ALi chipset installed in a laptop.  You can see a dc3000 connected to Port 1 of the USB card.  Please note that the Movie Writers will show up as 3 devices, a Generic USB hub (which resides inside the Movie Writer), a USB Mass Storage Device (the DVD drive), and the HP DVD Movie Writer  (which is the video capture device).  You may find that with your dc3000, the Mass Storage Device is on port 2 and the HP DVD Movie Writer dc3000 is on port 1.   Also, the name of the capture device may state HP DVD Movie Writer dc3000, HP DVD Movie Writer dc3000/dc4000, or simply HP DVD Movie Writer in the case of the dc5000.

This USBView Screenshot of a laptop also has a built-in Intel hub, as well as a Via-based card in the docking station so that's why there are so many USB devices that show up in the screenshot.

You might be curious how the 2-port PCMCIA/Cardbus ALi-based USB 2.0 card shows up as 12 devices.  The reason for this is that the ALi chip that is used in the card can actually control 6 USB ports even though it's only hooked up to 2 physical ports.  There are two sets of drivers for each port, one set for the high speed devices (i.e., 480 Mbps), called the Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller, and another set for the lower speed devices (i.e., 1.5 or 12 Mbps)  which will show up as Open or Universal Host Controllers.  The low speed driver is shared between each pair of ports so you'll see three of them while the high speed driver handles all 6 ports.

If you put a USB 2.0 card in your computer but can only see the 'Open' or 'Universal' Host Controllers, it could be an indication that you don't have any high speed (i.e., 480 Mbps) Enhanced Host Controller drivers installed.   These drivers come as part of the latest service packs on Win2K and WinXP.  So you should make sure that you are running the latest service packs.

To check which service pack you have, right click on the My Computer icon and select Properties.  The OS and Service Pack  will appear under the 'General' tab. Make sure that Service Pack 1 is installed if you're running XP and Service Pack 4 if you're running Win2K.   If not, go to Windows Update in the  Start-> Help and Support menu and download it for free from Microsoft.    WinXP may warn you if you plug the DVD Movie Writer into a bus that is running at low or full speed provided you have Service Pack 1 installed, but Win2K will not give you any warning regardless of the service pack level. 

To test if your interface is running at high speed, measure the time it takes to backup some files to a DVD disk with RecordNow using the DVD+RW media that came with the HP DVD Movie Writer.  It should take less than 30 minutes to write a full 2.4x DVD+RW disk.  If it takes much longer, then it's possible your interface isn't operating at high speed.  Please make sure to disable the 'verify data after write' option in RecordNow while running this test.

 

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