John writes in with a hardware question:
Q. I have 4 USB's but cannot get any to work with peripheral hardware such as printer, zip drive, etc. The computer is a gateway lap top 1.9 processor. Any ideas?
A. If you are referring to the USB ports on the computer/motherboard itself it could be that they have gone bad. I have seen it before. You can also check the BIOS to make sure the USB ports are not disabled.
If you are using a USB hub and its bus powered rather than self powered it will not work with many devices. You should use one that has its own power source that you plug into the wall.
You can buy a USB addon card that you can install into your computer. It most likely will be a PCI type card. If you go to our tech products page and do a search for PCI USB it will bring up some examples. They are really cheap too.
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