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[How-To] Know if your PC has USB 2.0 or USB1.1?

Madhur writes in from the capital city of Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow. Madhur in his mail writes to me asking about USB Versions and how to figure out which version is running on his PC. For his and all other readers, i have decided to put up a post on USB.

USB stands for Universal Serial Bus. The question of identifying USB version is pretty important especially in a scenario when you are buying an old computer from someone. USB 2.0 is known to deliver speeds upto 480MBps while the older USB 1.1 limits you to 12MBps. This is quite an issue if you wish to use something like an external hard disk.

Version One or Two?

There are two widely known ways of figuring out the USB version standard available on your PC. One of the most commonly used way is to figure it out using the MSInfo32 exe. In order to launch this exe, follow the below mentioned steps

  1. Click Start->Run
  2. Type in MSInfo32.exe at the input box.
  3. Browse to the USB Section and you should see two USB 2.0 Root Hub Entries, if your system includes the faster version.

Alternatively, you could figure this out using Control Panel as well.

  1. Launch Device Manager using the Control Panel (Control Panel -> System-> Hardware)
  2. Expand USB Section.
  3. If you have an ‘Enhanced’ USB host controller listed then your system supports USB 2.0. Just one or two ‘Enhanced’ controllers means your computer system is using USB 2.0

USB 2.0 is backward compatible with USB1.0/1.1. While this is definitely true and is known to many of us, what actually comes as a surprise to many is the forward compatibility of USB 1.1 with USB2.0. So whenever a system has USB 2.0 ports, you will find the “Enhanced” USB Controller in Device Manager plus two other USB Controllers.

Also read: How-To: Disable and Re-enable USB Storage Devices

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 8:50 pm and is filed under How-To, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “[How-To] Know if your PC has USB 2.0 or USB1.1?”

  1. [...] 2008 by Vaibhav Pandey Previously, i wrote about the hack to enable and disable USB and also the simple way to know if you have a USB1.1 or a USB 2.0 on your PC. In this post which is also about USB or the Universal Serial Bus, i share with you an [...]

  2. good,but i can’t know it well.

    wwww.1.8h4.cn

  3. great info…

  4. Hi,
    m working on Dell INSPIRON 1100… LAPTOP.. IN My company.

    There is no restriction to use usb drive. but somehow many systems in our company got stuck with security and prompting username and password whenever we plug usb drive.

    Any one pls help me out .. this is under windows platform

    This discussion is very good .. Itried but still m not able to do it.

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