Need an extra PCI slot...

[Jim R]

  I want to add a PCI USB card for some additional ports, but don't have a slot available. Since I have a DSL connection now(hard wired to the router in another room), can I remove the 56k modem card from my old dial-up connection and gain the slot I need, or is it still needed to do its magic to keep my DSL connection alive? 

Happy Holidays to All!!  Jim

[Cloudschatze]

  I want to add a PCI USB card for some additional ports, but don't have a slot available. Since I have a DSL connection now(hard wired to the router in another room), can I remove the 56k modem card from my old dial-up connection and gain the slot I need, or is it still needed to do its magic to keep my DSL connection alive? 

You're likely connected to the router via ethernet, so removing the old modem won't affect your DSL connection. Unless you specifically need it for dial-up purposes, I say pull it out.

[Jim R]

  Thanks for the reply! Then pull it it is. I'll yank it tonight when I shut down and we'll see what happens.  Do you think I need to unistall through the device manager first, or remove any drivers? Oh shoot, let's just pull it and go from there! Thanks again.

  Jim

[the_doctor]

you should be able to just yank it.  when windows comes up and finds it gone, it'll just remove it automatically from device manager.

[Jim R]

  Thanks, Doctor.  That's exatly what happened. Since I'm obviously on line, everything went as described. I'm always impressed by the level of knowledge on this site, (and I don't mean answering my basic questions) and sometimes wonder what a computer illiterate like me is doing here! Tom has a real winner here with this site and great members.
  It wasn't long ago I looked at my computer and said "Wow! 7 USB ports, I'll never need all those!". Right.

  Jim

[BlueMax]

Since you already have the card, I guess it's too late to suggest a USB hub for splitting some of the simpler devices...

...but an internal card will certainly work BETTER.  If you get it cheap, and placement of those ports isn't an issue, go for it!  (Sometimes it can be nice to use a hub and make those hard-to-reach ports more accessible.)

[Jim R]

  Thanks, BlueMax. I already have a 4 port PCI USB card installed, and wanted to add one more to "hide" most of the cables for more permanent usb devices like printers, scanner, ext hd, ext dvd drive, keyboard, mouse, tablet, etc and leave the front ports empty for my jump drives and the like. I'm not much of a fan of hubs, no scientific reason but they don't seem to run as fast as an internal, all being usb 2 of course. Probably just my imagination.
  Happy Holidays to all!

   Jim

[mace]

Well, consider that when you use a hub all the devices on that hub need to share in the bandwidth of the one hub, and because the hub is hooked up to one USB port that means that it has to divide the bandwidth or "speed" of one USB port over all the devices attached to the hub. 

With things like printers, mice and keyboards this is not an issue, since they don't need the full speed of a USB port anyway, but if you hook up two jumpdrives and use them simultaneously, you will notice a speed decrease.