Sun Feb 15, 2004 8:20 am
You probably don't want to read this, maybe even have heard or read it before. You really need a new computer.
I'd guess that if you don't have usb built onto your motherboard, it's old enough that you are also running an older operating system. Now your system may have usb pin outs on the mother board and all you need is the adapter to connect to the motherboard and add usb ports to an empty position on the rear of the case. That was the situation with my previous machine. But it required upgrading to a later OS as well. You need to be running at least Windows 98 SR 2 (service release/service pack 2). But you may not be that lucky. There are serial and parallel port readers/adapters. There are even adapters which fit a card to a floppy disk shaped device and allow them to be read through a floppy drive if you don't have free ports. I have no idea how well that actually works. I'd expect any of these readers to be dreadfully slow.
Then hand in hand with the old os, you'll have an older graphics card, old and/or too little memory, slow processor, etc. Likely a small hard drive and no CD-R/CD-rw burner to transfer pictures too. So while you may well be able to get pictures to it, you probably won't be happy with it.
You may find the stand-alone printer (or local printer at Wally world, etc.) works for you, you may also find that you have an interest in getting more from your shots than you can get with a direct print.