IEEE 1394 has been around for awhile now. Firewire to Apple users, it is the best alternative out there to USB 2.0. Now Microsoft swears up and down that XP SP2 does in fact contain IEEE 1394b drivers. According to Tom’s Hardware, this does not appear to be the case at all!

“The Microsoft employee [whose name is known to us] thus confirms the claim of Unibrain that whenever an IEEE 1394b device is connected the throughput sinks to the minimum allowed by the 1394 bus: In the IEEE1394 standard the speed classes such as S100 and S800 are synonymous for signaling rates in MBit/s.

Microsoft maintains its Windows XP Service Pack 2 includes drivers for IEEE 1394b. But according to our tests using the Release Candidate 2 prior to the Service Pack 2’s launch earlier this month, a 1394b device’s speed dips to a measly 100 MBit/s.”