Customer Reviews

Orange Micro OrangeLink FireWire CardBus PC Card ( 70HTL00060 )

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This product is dangerous and flakey under several instances of Windows 2000 and on different machines. The card is virtually unsupported, current drivers for Windows 2000 Professional are unavailable, there's not even an old version available for download.

I really like the card giving me extra USB and firewire ports however it seems OrangeMicro may be out of bus. So future support for these cards could be limited.. Just a word of warning.

Make sure you note that this is a USB and not a USB2 card. If that's what you're looking for, you're in good shape.

This is a good legacy device for older PCI Powermacs such as the Performa series or the Beige G3. It offers both USB 1.1 and FireWire 400 on one card. Since most first generation PCI Macintoshs can't run OS X, they don't support USB 2.0 speeds, therefore this device will be just fine for these particular models. I use the Orange Micro OrangeLink Firewire/USB PCI Board in my Powermac 6500.

If one uses MacOS 9.1 or higher, the USB and FireWire extensions should be installed by default, hence the OrangeLink card will work out of the box, essentially. If the extensions are not included/installed, they can also be downloaded from the Apple Website.

To conclude, this is a good, solid-working card which is compatible with a vast array of PCI Powermacs - Definiatly worth the buy.

P.S.: For all who are intending to use this multi-bus device in the 55/6500 series Powermac or TAM, make sure to note that one has to install a Firmware patch, which can be downloaded from the OrangeMicro website, in order to be able to use the card. If this patch is not installed, both USB and FireWire will not be functional, actually, they won't be detected at all. Again, this only applies to the 55/6500/TAM series as these models have compatibility issues with multi-bus cards. It will work without patch in all other listed models