Yes try removing the NIC and put the USB2 card in that slot, you could also first try disabling the onboard USB as a test to see if the two are not compatible (same memory range or other resources)...
Usually you do not need to change the PnP OS from disabled on DOS/WIn9x boxes from my experience....

Good advice, thankyou. I removed the NIC but I still had to move the USB card to the 1st PCI slot before it would boot without the same resource conflict messages.

I was able to install the USB card's drivers from CD and then NUSB to allow USB mass storage to work in Windows 98SE. This is working but I'm now seeing Windows freeze pretty regularly when I'm using the USB, e.g. I was able to copy an 80MB file from USB to hard disk in about 10 seconds, but when I started to copy another file I got a freeze before it got started. Mouse and keyboard (PS/2) stop responding and I have to just power off. I'm willing to accept this is just Win98 being Win98 and just live without it I guess. I'm considering trying out Windows ME so perhaps that will fare better.

Windows ME did not fare any better. I did a fresh install of ME, installed chipset drivers (it told me all drivers were already installed), video driver, and finally USB 2 card and driver from its CD.

USB flash drive worked with the built-in support in Windows ME, and I was able to copy small files back and forth. Trying to copy a large file (a 500MB ISO file) froze everything just as instantly as it didon Windows 98 SE.

I tried copy the same file using the USB 1 ports on the motherboard and noticed a couple of things. Obviously it was very slow, but it was also slowing the whole system down with the mouse becoming very laggy and jumpy. It makes me wonder if large USB file transfer at USB2 speed is just too heavy a job for a 450MHz Pentium 3?

Did you enable PnP aware OS option?

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-26, 11:05:

Did you enable PnP aware OS option?

I did not remember to try that. I shall do so, and read up on what it's really supposed to do.

With Pnp Aware OS enabled, Windows ME still froze up but I could still move the mouse. Couldn't click anything.

I installed Windows 2000 with some interesting results. Again, small transfers worked ok, but larger ones would freeze up - not the whole computer, but explorer would stall out. A couple of times the USB drive appeared to disconnect with Windows telling me off for not safely removing it first. Thinking it might just be a bad flash drive I tried others, but with the same results. It seems like the USB interface is falling over when pushed to do very much work. I tried 2000 with PnP Aware OS both on and off with the same results -I believe its supposed to be off for 2k/XP onwards anyway.

I'm ready to give up on the card at this point - it may actually be broken, or just terminally incompatible with my system.

With PnP aware OS turned on and Windows 2000 stalling then i start to suspect the card itself.

I bought it new from a major online PC components store about a week ago, for £1.50. I guess technically I can return it. . . but it would cost more to return than I'd get back 😜

So I tried this USB 2 card in another computer, a Pentium 4 machine with Windows XP, and it worked flawlessly. It was using drivers built into XP rather than from the CD that came with the card. Did a 4GB file copy from a flash drive in about 3 1/2 minutes, so performance was in the right ballpark.

I figured this was worth a try in the Gateway machine where I'd had trouble, so I installed XP and then the USB card. It freezes the computer (mouse and all) on file copies of any significant size, just as with other Windows versions, PnP aware or not. It just doesn't like this computer I guess.

Edit: I bought another card, a Startech card with a VIA chip, and it just worked.