Does one do such a thing? I’ve an older MacBook Pro, and it has 2 USB ports. One on either side, none in the back.
Can one update the USB drivers on a Mac? Should one? Does it do anything for the speed of the port?
Thank you,
Cartooniverse
in practice-No.
run software update. If there are new drivers for any of the hardware, they will be installed. Since Apple built the USB ports, that is the source of the drivers.
So relax, keep your OS up to date with auto update and be happy.
There is no such thing.
Any USB drivers update would be contained in a Firmware or Software update. If you use Software Update regularly to keep your machine current, you have the latest and greatest.
Now, that said, individual USB devices may have their own drivers which need updating, and you will need to go their respective websites to make sure you are running the most current driver.
USB drivers definitely exist. People patch their USB drivers all the time so that they sample at 1000 Hz instead of 125 Hz. Official driver updates are pretty infrequent though and nobody bothers with them outside of that one context.
Exactly why I posted the OP. I am going from a PC Express broadband card to a USB card. Doing what I can to eliminate the choke points and USB speed is clearly a potential choke point. Can I really download a patch for Mac OS-X that will change the sample speed from 125hz to 1000 hz ?? If so, where?
I’d be all over that.
No.
USB 2.0 peaks at 480 Mb/sec, far, far faster than the speeds you’ll get over the broadband network. The “choke point” here is entirely outside of your control.
why would you even bother? the only people who even futz with stuff like that are 1) gamers who think it makes a difference in latency for mouse movements, and 2) people who think it’ll make something faster but don’t understand anything about it.
Polling rate affects things like interrupt transfers only, e.g. mouse events, key presses, things like that. Your broadband card is likely to transfer in bulk mode, and changing the polling rate won’t do anything for that.
Thank you. I appreciate the answers.
I get new Broadband card, hope for the best. The external antenna made a tremendous difference when I used it with the old full-width PCMCIA card. Hope it has the same positive effect here.