I built my current, basing it on an Asus A7V8X-X systemboard and AMD Athlon XP 2500+. For the most part, I’ve been very pleased with it. The only problem that I’ve run into is under Windows XP: The USB ports are detected as USB 1.1 ports, instead of USB 2.0.

This has been annoying me for a little while, but since I almost never use XP, it hasn’t annoyed me too much. The only time I really notice the problem is when I boot into XP, fire up iTunes, and plug in the iPod Shuffle to transfer songs to it. XP pops up a warning, “A high-speed device has been attached to a low-speed USB port.”

I had a couple of free minutes yesterday, so I decided to do a quick Google search. And I couldn’t find anything at all relating to this problem. I searched Asus’s website, too, and didn’t find anything even related. But on their downloads page for the A7V8X-X, I noticed that they had a USB 2.0 driver. And it occurred to me that I never installed this driver in XP. I assumed that XP would simply detect the USB 2.0 port, and all would be fine. So I downloaded and installed the driver. After a reboot, XP correctly saw the ports as USB 2.0 high-speed. And transfer speeds in iTunes to the Shuffle went up drastically.

Moral of the story: Install the drivers, even if you don’t think they are necessary.