Last week I posted on this board a plea for help. I had just gotten a new Dell 2650 Inspiron and was trying to get it to talk properly with a firewire ADS Pyro box. The Pyro would send data to the laptop at a healthy rate, but in the reverse direction the best I could see was only 3MB/sec, too slow for DV capture.
Turns out that there is a major bug in one of the chips in the laptop. ANY PC card (firewire, USB2, SCSI) plugged into the side of the laptop would be choked in a similar fashion. One diligent owner tracked down the chip vendor, and an engineer at that company eventually emailed to him a firmware fix for that chip. The sad thing about all this is that, to date, Dell has refused to even admit that their product had this major shortcoming. I really like the laptop, and the price was amazing ($590 after rebates!).
For anyone who would like to learn more about this situation, or would need to download the firmware fix, go to this site:
http://home.insightbb.com/~scottlandon
Turns out that there is a major bug in one of the chips in the laptop. ANY PC card (firewire, USB2, SCSI) plugged into the side of the laptop would be choked in a similar fashion. One diligent owner tracked down the chip vendor, and an engineer at that company eventually emailed to him a firmware fix for that chip. The sad thing about all this is that, to date, Dell has refused to even admit that their product had this major shortcoming. I really like the laptop, and the price was amazing ($590 after rebates!).
For anyone who would like to learn more about this situation, or would need to download the firmware fix, go to this site:
http://home.insightbb.com/~scottlandon