I have a Gateway 710XL tower purchased in 2003 (guess that makes it old). All of the USB ports (2 in front, 4 in back) are USB 1.0 and I would like to upgrade to USB 2.0. Can I do that with some sort of connection "card" or is that a function handled in the motherboard (MoBo) as my geek squad says? How do I go about upgrading? Thanks for the help.

In most pc's made today, the usb ports on front are going to be 1.1 USB and the ones on back will be 2.0

Check your device mgr under Universal Bus Controllers, if you have a device listed under there with the name Enhaced USB controller, these would be the 2.0, if does not say Enhanced, they would be 1.1 controllers - either way all you are looking for is Enhanced to see if it has drivers for 2.0

Here is a link with latest 2.0 driver
VIA USB 2.0 Driver 2.7
VIA USB 2.0 Driver 2.7 download for Windows

Just click the [Click here to Download*] line, not the one right below it, all you want is the download

Download and install and then check your device mgr again and you should have the Enhanced shown

http://www.softwarepatch.com/pics/devman.jpg

Thanks seahwk83. I checked DM and in fact I do have "enhancedcontroller listed" (I don't understand all the coded numbers etc (Intel (R) 82801EB USB2 Enhanced Host Contoller - 24DD) whatever that means... how do I find this particular port?

You can still download above, it is updated and as mentioned earlier, the ports on the back of the PC "should" be 2.0

To confirm which port, plug a 2.0 device into all ports to see if they are recognized, should get an error or not recognized if 2.0 is put in 1.1 as it should not work or be seen in My Computer