zip drive with NT vs. zip drive with 98

[Verruckt]

I have a parallel port Zip100 drive that I share between home and work. At home I use the drive under Win98, at work I use it under WinNT 4 sp5.
Now, at home I have some old IomegaWare drivers (~900K install file) installed under 98, wheras at work I have the latest IomegaWare 2.21 (15MB install file).

At work the SAME parallel zip drive is almost 10x as fast as when at home. Is this because of the different operating systems, or do the new drivers really improve performance that much? Or could it simply be motherboard/hardware differences between the two computers?

Basically - at home it takes a good half hour to transfer 40MB of data off the zip drive onto my hard drive. Is there any way I can make it as fast as on my NT work machine?

...thanks

 

[WebDude]

Just guessing here really, but how is the parallel port on your machines configured in the bios? There are a few different parallel port "protocols" (don't know if that's the correct term), standard, bidirectional, DMA supported, etc. As I say I'm just guessing, but the proper selection could speed up the parallel port transfer rate, maybe. (?)

 

[Verruckt]

yeah. My work box (NT) has the parallel port set to "bidirectional" whereas my home box (98) has it set to ECC (I think, or ECP or something).

I guess I'll try bidirectional at home...

thanks for the info!