I want to buy a scanner to work with my Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop. The scanners I’m looking at are all equipped with USB 2.0 connections. The laptop is about a year and a half old.
My laptop has two USB ports on the back, and one port on the side labelled “1394” which (according to the manual) is an IEEE 1394 Firewire 4-pin jack. The “Help and Support” system configuration says that I have four USB controllers, three of which are “Intel 82801DB/DBM USB Universal Host Controller” and one of which is “Intel 82801DB/DBM USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller”.
So this has me confused. Is the 1394 jack a USB 2.0 port? It’s not the same shape as the “regular” USB ports, it’s shaped sort of like a letter B instead of a rectangle. It’s smaller than the “mini” USB connector on my digital camera.
You can see the illustration of this device in the Dell User Manual (PDF format, click on “A Tour of your computer” and then “Left side view”) Unfortunately, the manual isn’t good for much more than saying “This is a USB port, this is a 1394 port”.
If this is indeed an IEEE 1394 port, can I plug a USB 2.0 scanner into it? Do I need a special adapter, or just a cable with different plugs?
USB and Firewire (IEEE1394) are not the same thing. Cables for one will not fit into sockets for the other.
Since your machine mentions a USB 2.0 controller you are all set, plug your scanner into one of the USB ports and you are good to go. Any PC made in the last couple of years should have USB 2.0, not USB 1.1.
USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 are compatible with each other - USB 1.1 is just slower. If the USB device, USB cable and USB port aren’t all at the 2.0 spec, the connection will run at 1.1 speeds, that’s all. If you are making a few scans now and then it’s not a big deal. If you are doing lots of high resolution scanning in full color the difference in speed would start to grate on you.
IEEE 1394 (firewire) port is not USB. It’s a completely different beast.
The USB connectors apear to be on the back of the laptop according to that PDF.
USB 1 and 2 both use the same type of physical port. To find out if your USB ports have USB 2.0 enhancement, look in the device manager under USB controllers. You should see “USB 2.0 enhanced controller” or words to that effect.
It’s kind of an non-issue for your use as USB 2.0 scanner will work perfectly fine with an older USB 1.1 port. In fact in terms of real world throughput requirements, there’s little reason for a typical flatbed scanner to even (really) need the throughput capabilities of 2.0 port.
Whether your port is the older 1.1 or the newer 2.0 the scanner will work fine.
USB 2.0 is simply the latest revision of the USB specification. A USB 2.0 device or controller is not required to support Hi-Speed. Many devices that are labeled as being compliant with USB 2.0 only support Low-Speed (1.5 Mbps) and/or Full-Speed (12 Mbps).
In that PDF manual, in the Appendix, there is a Specifications section.
In there, under Ports and Connectors, it says: two 4-pin USB 2.0–compliant connectors.
Since I only see two USB ports in the diagram, I’d say you were set.
I say that because my motherboard has both USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 ports, and I can never remember which are which. Why on earth they didn’t just make them all 2.0, I don’t know. Probably saved them $1.57 somewhere, or they had a surplus of 1.1 controllers they had to use up.
Sincere thanks to everyone for their help and suggestions. Special thanks to cstamets, who noticed what I missed - the “Specifications” section of the manual. :smack:
