[PLUG] Is USB substandard?

plug_0 at robinson-west.com plug_0 at robinson-west.com
Fri Feb 24 10:51:00 UTC 2006


I recently tried to go from two to three add on 100baseTX cards
on an Intel D815EEA2 motherboard.  Ended up jerking my wireless 
card and a modem to make this work.  What frustrates me is that 
the USB takes two interrupts and can't be disabled.  Why is it
that USB didn't replace all the PS/2 ports, serial ports, and
parallel port?  How hard would it be to keep these ports in
the same place on the motherboard but make them part of the
USB system to save interrupts? 

Why did PC manufacturers violate the hard drives go on IRQ 14
standard and extend them out over 15 as well?  Why is there
IRQ sharing and confusing ACPI steering instead of something
less insane such as more IRQ's?  Why is it that PCI slot 1
and slot 5 on this motherboard are somehow tied together in
the bios?

USB is supposed to be the new standard replacing the old serial,
parallel, and PS/2 port standards.  I've yet to see a PC
motherboard that is solely PS/2 based for the keyboard, mouse,
din serial devices, centronic parallel devices, etc.  If something
were done to get the hard drive back to one interrupt and
all serial devices down to one interrupt, IRQ conflicts would 
be less of an issue.  For that matter, the floppy controller
anymore seems to be a waste.

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