There are an abundance of USB hubs now available on the market, each varying in their
features and price, but predominantly designed to add additional USB ports to your system
configuration. During a review of such products, we became acquainted with Entrega who has
recently been acquired by Xircom, manufacturer of a variety of LAN adapters and modems and
dongles -- mostly for the laptop marketplace.
In our desire to expand our own system, we compared the Entrega product to
others available in our area, and were surprised to find, at the time, that only Entrega
offered such a unique configuration with their 4 port Multi-Function USB Hub. In addition
to adding the standard 4 USB ports, the Entrega also adds 2 serial and 1 parallel port to
your system.
The device plugs into your existing USB port in your PC, and it comes with
one disk of software and device drivers. We did not believe the installation would work as
flawlessly as the documentation claimed. We fully expected spending hours of lost time
configuring the device to work with and recognize all of our peripherals, but such was not
the case. The Entrega hub installed within minutes and performed perfectly out of the box.
Using its own custom drivers, the Entrega hub "fools" the system
into believing it has additional parallel and serial ports, and the devices which we hung
off these ports functioned as perfectly as if they were hung off the back of our PC. In
fact, the only problem we experienced was with our Tektronix Phaser 840 printer which
worked most reliably when plugged directly into the PC's USB port as opposed to the
Entrega hub. This appears to be no fault of Entrega, and rather a symptom of the printer.
If you are tired of daisy chaining your parallel peripherals and are
uncomfortable adding an additional card to your PC, this is the least painful and fastest
way to resolve your problems. We have been using the Entrega USB hub now for six months,
and it behaves as well as it did the first day we installed it. We have even daisy chained
a Best Data USB hub off it, and everything still works fine.
The Entrega (now Xircom) series of USB
hubs is just what the doctor ordered. You may get more information by clicking here.
Entrega
