Yes you need a USB 2 lead to get USB 2 speeds. The same with 3.0.
USB 3 isn't natively supported by Windows 7, it will be in Windows 8. It does work in Windows 7 though with third party drivers and a couple of updates. It does not work properly on XP however. So if you're going to stay with XP, don't bother.
I'm not surprised that you had a bad experience with XP x64, XP x64 is Server 2003 x64 and there were very few consumer drivers ever released for it.
Seriously though, dive in with Windows 7 x64
(forget x86
) before you get too comfortable with the installation and it becomes harder to migrate. 7 is far better optimised to make use of multi-core than XP in a native fashion. Better yet as you have a Intel VT processor you can run XP inside Windows 7 through XP mode and have both up at the same time. That way you can run your legacy apps and hardware in the VM
(incl. USB
).
If you were really desparate you could even have 7 boot directly into XP.
You won't have the driver problems with 7 x64 that you do with 2003 x64. Windows update will have most of the missing drivers if it doesn't come on the DVD.
