[plug] USB ports

[Jason Nicholls]

Hey Richard,

> Stupid question, but are I've bought a "VOIP USB Phone" which is
> (supposedly) perfect for Skype and others.
> 
> It seems to work fine under W2K., except that the sound quality is crap,
> and the ring tones don't get out AND the screen doesn't light up - which
> suggests to me that the USB ports I have plugged it in to may not be
> powered.
> 
> Question : are all USB motherboard ports powered? Are any of them
> powered? What do I do? Buy a USB powered hub?

All USB motherboard ports should be powered, although some might include
a non-powered hub in the form of a AT expansion slot or drive plate.
Don't know in those cases...

I found that for some reason under linux you may not be able to draw
enough power from the ports though. For example, I have a blackberry and
it won't charge when plugged in under linux (the BB pops up an error
message with "USB charging current is not sufficient"). However, if I
boot to windows on the same laptop it charges fine. Perhaps your VoIP
phone is a high powered device that has a similar problem. Do you have
another host not running linux with USB ports you could test it out on?

Unfortunately figuring out what's going wrong here has been low on my
list of priorities so I have no idea what the real issue is :)


Jason Nicholls
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Jason Nicholls                     email: <jason at mindsocket.com.au>
http://jason.mindsocket.com.au/     cell: 206 310 4239 (US)
--------------------------------------------------------------------
   pgp/gpg id: 0xC3844959  
  fingerprint: 7F7A 5846 4E94 459C 104D  A979 7079 24CF C384 4959