March 05, 2005

[Mac] iPod Shuffle issues with Dell

Got an iPod Shuffle for my bro as a b-day present. And since I am down with my BF, we are all excited to see it in action. After the "ooh, it's so small and nice" comments, we commenced to get it to work with the home pc, which is a Dell Dimension 8100 (yeah, yeah, it's a bit old now).
Now, gee whizz, what is this? The Shuffle is not working? Can't read/write to device, or unknown USB device. Huh? Well, lots up updating of our BIOS (since we are up-to-date with MS SP), any new drivers for the system. Well, the system is much nippier, and the advice we kept getting from google-searching was "If you have MS SP1, that should have your USB2.0 support", crappy. So much for that. And it was getting really late.
So this morning, I decided to google-search some more, and finally made progress after finding that 2 top ports at the back of the Dell is for keyboard and mouse and most importantly (and how could I now know!), Dell uses crappy components, and also may not provide enough power to Shuffle. So some hope. Out to town today then, to acquire ourselves a USB PCI card, and take if from there.
Oh, just to note, plugged the iPod Shuffle into my BF's PB, and it works, and even uploaded music to it. Go figure!

UPDATE Got ourselves a Belkin USB PCI card. And works a dream after installing it on the system. Yay! Music to Shuffle no problem now.

Posted by whykay at March 5, 2005 11:30 AM