Some weird and devistating advice from gateway.. can someone tell me how true it is??

Don't get a gateway.

Period.

If ANY manufacturer is going to tell you that, they don't deserve any business. I suspect however, there is more to it than what I am reading, but you may not have been told the extent of it either.

That being said, no do NOT depend on USB ports for powering any device. USB as a spec does not provide much power at all, it is intended only for very low power devices, mice, keyboards, etc. I have seen enclosures that try to draw power for things like hard drives or similar from multiple USB ports, this is a bad idea and can cause damage.

You will need to power your equipment separately, though it should all be able to be plugged into the same power strip on a single outlet to prevent ground loops. Nothing you listed is that high of a power draw. If you add amps or powered speakers onto that, then you might need to start thinking about a better power distribution though.

Seablade

This post caught my attention because small laptops are now used in many large corporate jets for navigational charts and real time weather. I'm a pilot and my company just picked up a plane that has two touchscreen computers running XP Pro built into the flight deck. The navigation software needs to be updated from CDs every couple weeks. We have a small portable DVD drive we picked up for this purpose. The drive uses two USB plugs, one for data and one for power. We are plugging both into the PC to run the updates. We only do this about once a week and the PCs are running on AC power (not battery) during the process. The update consists of only two CDs each time. I'm sure the DVD drive was designed to watch movies on ultra small portables that didn't come with an internal drive.

Do you think that there is a risk of causing physical damage to the hardware this way? I can see it might be stressful if running the PC from battery but it it's plugged in?

As far as the first poster's question...You could always pick up a powered USB hub for a little reassurance that you are getting enough power to your USB devices. I suppose this would work for me also but it seems easier to just plug in the external device to an AC outlet

Well it always depends on the power draw of the drive, but judging form what you have posted, and what I know of CD drives, I would bet the CD drive is drawing more than the USB spec is designed to give.

It will work in some cases, don't get me wrong. However the spec is designed a certain way, and it will not work with laptops following the spec strictly that only using one power supply line for their USB ports, typical of a single bus. I'll give you a better example, take a look at the HP ultra-portable they just announced...

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en...5-3687084.html

Click on the demo > Product Views > Right Side View > USB 2.0 Port [Powered]

That is a port they designed specifically to power an external CD Rom drive. It has an extension on the port that is not part of the USB port you can see, that provides the additional power needed for the CD Rom drive, and I am fairly certain they made that drive to draw as little power as possible. The reason it needs it is because even doing so it still draws more than the USB spec.

On laptops that can't provide the power in the method those two USB lines need, damage can happen. In some cases (many?) the ports are protected in a method similar to a circuit breaker, and will shut off until you restart the computer. This is what happens on my G4 Powerbook and I am pretty certain on my MacBook Pro because someone tried to run one of those two usb port drives off it. But I can't guarantee that exists on all laptops, so my method is to not use the method at all since it violates spec. I would rather power the drives externally. I also do not believe it would make a difference if it is plugged in or not due to how most of the power is delivered in those machines.

Seablade

Don't get a Gateway, Dell, or anything Sigmatel or RealTek for audio. They all ship drivers that deliverable disable stereo mixer and other sound card functionality.

I know it's straying from the OP, but what about portable hdds that draw all their power from USB? I assume they would be rated to only draw so much. Oh and don't forget you can add additional power to the USB rails by plugging in a hub which is plugged into the wall.

I am not a fan of those HDs. In particular many of them expect the ports to be on multiple busses, which is not always the case, and some even draw overspec'd power from the USB bus itself, which is not a good thing. Many laptops now have a protection mechanism in the case of this happening, that acts like a circuit breaker and will shut off the USB port/bus if an overvoltage is detected. This has saved my laptop when someone tried to plug one of these in before. I had to shut down the laptop and leave it off for a few seconds, but once I did that the port started working fine. In newer versions of OS X I believe you even get a warning message now IIRC when this happens. Don't know about Windows, and unless you set one up I don't think you get one in Linux.

In general if I want a bus powered HD, I will stick to Firewire. I know this sucks for those of you in the PC world that have very limited(Fujitsu/Samsung in fact) choices on laptops with powered firewire, but a 2.5" HD can be powered from the firewire bus without much problem at all. In fact I have one doing so right now as I type.

Seablade

And I just realised I had already typed some of that info, oh well. Its been a while since I typed anything in this thread

Seablade

I remember Windows 98 giving me "too much power consumed on USB" errors but I've never seen them on XP. Wait...it might have been XP....*scratches head*

But that was on my old Dell desktop which was USB 1.0 and only had 2 USB ports.