Introduction: Hacks #75-84

As you travel through a PC system from the inside to the outside, you end up at the I/O, or Input and Output systems: serial, parallel, game, USB, and IEEE-1394 ports. There isn't a great deal here—just a couple of ports that slog along at what seems like a snail's pace compared to blazing CPU speeds and outrageous disk drive transfer rates—but what you do have can use some understanding and hacking to get them shipshape. By shipshape I mean working at the speeds they are supposed to, not conflicting with other devices or themselves, and operating in the correct mode for the peripherals connected to them.

While you shouldn't look for any spectacular performance boost in your I/O ports, they can be one of the most frustrating parts of a PC to deal with if things do not work right.

While the hacks in this chapter might not apply to your shiny new legacy-free laptop, they will help you out if you're working with an older PC used by a friend, school, or church, or trying to recycle an old system as a server or Linux system.

If you don't have enough ports, there are ways to add more—from bending the COM port configuration rules for connecting conventional I/O devices to expanding port availability with USB devices.

Rules? Do you mean to imply that there are actually rules you should abide by when configuring PC I/O devices? Of course—no computer system would work consistently if there were not a few rules lying around and being enforced. Indeed, computing is based on rules from the lowest level machine code that starts things up, to, um, the lowest level machine code that actually runs in the CPU.

Face it, the PC didn't just pop out of some guy's garage ready to run DOS, Windows, Linux, Solaris x86, BeOS, or whatever you can get to run on your system and drive's thousands of possible combinations of modems, video cards, network cards, sound cards, keyboards, mice, and disk drives. Somewhere, sometime, you will run into a device or port that needs a specific configuration when the PC stops cooperating. Knowing a few simple configuration rules and how to work around them may not make your PC run faster, but the right configuration can make a PC run properly if not better.