Conflicting USB devices?

Sigh… I’m actually asking for help with my computer. I hope I don’t have to turn in my geek card, I’ve got to get it punched at the theater in 5 hours. :wink:

I’ve got two USB ports on my compaq presario desktop (500 MHz PIII, 128 MB) with Win98. I’ve got 3 USB devices that individually work fine:

HP Printer/Scanner/Copier
Cheapass no-name webcam
Handspring Visor Deluxe sync-cradle

But if I want to use the Visor cradle, I have to unplug whatever’s in the other USB port. If I don’t, it refuses to connect to the PC, and I have to soft reset the Visor and unplug the other USB device to get it to sync again.

Is there a way to fix this?

yeah, boring question, I know… bump?

The Visor might be drawing too much power on startup. Does it have an external power cable or is it powered off the bus? If it has external power that’s described as “optional” you might try using it.

I assume the cradle is powered off of the bus or the visor itself. The visor itself runs off 2 AAA’s. there’s no external power source for it.

Power drain is my thought too.

I had this problem with a cheap optical mouse that drew too much power from the USB bus. It would work fine if alone, but if anything else was plugged in problems would arise.

I went and got a powered (it gets its power from a transformer pugged into the wall, not from the computer’s USB) USB hub. I have a 4 port model made by Belkin. It suppiles power to the USB chain so that things that are a little too power hungy don’t ruin it for everything else.

I’ve heard of other people have trouble with devices that didn’t like being plugged into hubs, but I’ve yet to see anything like that.

Not to continue the long line of power suggestion, but the very same thing occured to me as well. Check your power supply, I’d bet its under 300w.