Has anyone had a particularly good/bad experience with a particular brand/model of PCI USB card installed in a B&W G3?
I bought a generic-ish "MacSense" VIA-chipset based five port USB2 card at Fry's this weekend that claimed to have Macintosh/OS X support, but it seemed to have rather serious issues with the B&W's PCI bus. Depending on what slot it was in it'd either kernel panic the machine on startup (Under Tiger or Panther), or "sort of work" with USB 1.1 devices (a MIDI device plugged into it was recognized, but experienced serious "key drop" and lagging not seen with the built-in USB ports), and sporadically "recognize" USB 2.0 devices but not actually work with them. (I tried both an iPod and a USB 2.0 hard disk. About half the time they'd show up in the system profiler, and the iPod would charge, but the Finder/Disk Utility/whatnot would never actually see them.)
Given that a B&W is basically a Beige in sheep's clothing I've sort of redefined my expectations in terms of what I should expect to work. I sort of wanted USB 2.0, but I'd settle for a solid 1.1 card. Any suggestions for either? Most of the inexpensive 2.0 cards seem to be based on the same VIA chipset as the one I bought, so I'm sort of leery about buying another one of those unless I hear of someone using one in a machine as old as a B&W without problems.
--Peace
Belkin seems to be about the best as far as working with OS 9 and OS X. I have used their cards in the Beige G3 and the B&W and never had a problem
Hmm. I bought a $11.00 IO Magic USB 2.0/1.1 card off of NewEgg a while ago. It works fine with anything I plug into it. I believe the chipset, NEC, that it uses is well supported anyhow.