It took a few years but USB is now firmly established as the simplest way to plug something into your PC. USB isn't that quick at squirting data back and forth though, so filling a multi-megabyte MP3 player or saving to an external hard disk can involve some serious thumb-twiddling.

Salvation should lie in USB 2, the successor to USB that's capable of transferring data at up to 480Mbits/s (40 times faster than standard USB). It uses the same physical socket, so is backwardly compatible, but the rub is that PCs don't have USB 2 as standard. That's where the Adaptec Duo Connect comes in.

The Duo Connect is a PCI expansion card that adds three USB 2 ports to your PC. The card also has a couple of FireWire ports included, so fit the Duo Connect and your PC will have ports aplenty to cope with anything you'll want to plug in for the foreseeable future.

Like any PCI card, fitting the Duo Connect involves opening your PC and popping it into a free PCI slot. The card also needs to be connected to the PC's power supply, since both USB 2 and FireWire ports are capable of powering external devices, and a single PCI slot can't provide enough juice for five ports running at once.

The card plugs into the same lead that powers the floppy drive but since many PCs only have one such plug and Adaptec doesn't supply a suitable cable splitter, you may need to visit your local PC components supplier to get the Duo Connect up and running.

Once it is running, the Duo Connect is faultless. Microsoft has just added USB 2 support to Windows XP and the CD-ROM comes with drivers for other Windows versions. There's also a handy utility that shows the status of any connected USB devices, plus some simple video-creation and DVD-creation software.

Contact

Adaptec: 01276 854500 www.adaptec-europe.com