Can you network computers using USB?

[cchan]

<<

<< if parallel was faster than usb then why is usb so successful? oh well.. dead argument. >>



Here are a few more reasons:
1) USB is meant to replace not only parallel ports but also serial ones. Even the current USB 1.0 is a lot faster than a serial connection.

2) USB was designed so to be daisychained whereas (usually) parallel was not designed for that, although there are workarounds. (Please no flames about how USB doesn't actually daisychain well, I know that already)

 

[odog]

USB is 12Mbps peak speed, parallel(i think it's 1.5Mbps) is not anywhere close to that..


just get a USB or PCMCIA network card for the laptop and a PCI 100mbit nic for the desktop and all you'll need after that is a crossover cable or a hub.


another thing to worry about, parallel is tied to the ISA bus which is an ohh so lovely 8 bits wide! USB on the other hand is off the PCI(or whatever the southbridge uses) bus and is 32 bit wide. both suck for cpu utilization, but USB is far better for anything.