My daughter pulled out to her new life recently and left us with only our old Dell XPS B866 (running XP Pro) that I'm trying to nurse along until we can buy a post-vista laptop next year. I had installed a cheap CompUSA PCI card years ago to upgrade to USB 2.0 and it worked fine for a while, then stopped recognizing my external hard drive. When did it quit? I don't really know; but suddenly everything I plugged in, windows called a "defective device". And they all worked fine on the native USB 1.1 so it's not the devices. I fiddled with the USB 2.0 drivers for a while, downloaded one and then used System Restore to go back to the XP drivers set, then gave up and ordered the new card(s). Now they won't let the machine even turn on. I flashed my Bios a couple of years ago before installing SP2 for XP.
The machine hasn't been over-clocked or hot-rodded at all. I'm not even at the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" level but I'm not ham-fisted either. I've done a bunch of simple drive and burner upgrades on my machine and others. I know how to carefully seat a board so I'm sure I'm not breaking boards or slots. I hope that's enough detail. One more thing: when I put the old CompUSA board (I think it's an "ALi" brand) back in the computer, it starts and works just fine. But all I have is the old USB1.1 because it still won't recognize anything plugged into the old enhanced USB card. All ideas are welcome.