Firewire problems

Remember when XP Service Pack 2 came along and messed up your Firewire camera data transfer speed? This was so long ago that I’d forgotten it, until I couldn’t get a high-res color Firewire camera to serve up images at the required frame rate.

After some head-scratching I noticed I was only getting 100Mbps and something deep in my memory told me it should have been 400. Eventually I got on to Google, and there I learned that Service Pack 3 had the same problem. In fact, for some bizarre reason, if you had implemented the SP2-1394 fix, the upgrade to SP3 would revert back to 100Mbps.

Being knowledgeable machine vision types, you, my dear readers, probably know all this. But just in case you too have forgotten, here are a couple of links.

Here is some information about XP SP2 and its impact on 1394 data speed.

And to bring you up to date, here’s a link to the Microsoft Knowledgebase article about 1394 and XP SP3.

Suddenly I’m wondering what speed to expect with Windows 7. Anyone?