USB Ports on a Toshiba laptop

[vanderwaal]

Can someone tell me if there is a way to tell if my USB ports on my laptop are sharing bandwidth. My Toshiba has 3 USB 2.0 ports. Two on one side, stacked and one on the opposite side. I'm assuming the stacked ones are sharing bandwidth but I'm not sure about the other. The reason I'm asking is that I'm considering a Tascam 1641 and I've heard that to get the full 2.0 bandwidth you need to not have anything else sharing the bandwidth. So, I was wondering if plugging a USB control surface in one side and the 1641 into the other side would cause a problem. Operating system is Vista. I'm fairly knowledgeable about computers. Been building my own systems for years but this is my first experience with Vista and I'm not sure where to look to find this out. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[brandondrury]

I'm using my gut on this one (similar to guessing, but with extra intuitive powers added) and I'm gonna guess that our control surface uses next to no bandwidth. The only time this would ever be an issue would be if you had all 16 inputs pegged. If you were only using 8 inputs I would say it's totally a non-issue. As far as that goes, I'd suspect USB 2.0 to handle something more like 48 tracks or so like Firewire, but I could be wrong on that one too.

Brandon

[Audio~Geek]

Usually the ports on the Left side are full power. Because it's a laptop you can almost guarantee there's a lot of sharing going on.

You can look at the IRQ assignments to verify the sharing.

I wouldn't go with a Tascam interface.