Recently I’ve been having problems with my USB ports on my primary computer. They simply… go away. Or at least some of them do. My mouse and my wireless network dongle are both plugged into ports directly on the back of my computer, and they never stop working.
However, two printers and my iPhone dock are plugged into what I assume are hubs - the printers are plugged into my monitor, which has another USB cord that plugs into the back of my computer.
The iPhone dock plugs directly into the FRONT of the computer.
Last night, they were all working fine. This morning, nada until I reboot. What the heck is going on?
For what it’s worth, the only semi-major change that’s happened lately is that I’ve installed and quite frequently run Microsoft Virtual PC. However, it’s nothing nice and easy, like the ports quit working when I start Virtual PC.
Other than that, everything I’ve been doing I’ve been doing for months or years, and never had any problems before.
Do these presumptive hubs come with wall warts, or are they unpowered?
If the later, your printers etc. may be pulling too much juice off the bus. That can cause it to go down, and cause all sorts of odd, seemingly unrelated symptoms as well.
I plugged my wife’s iPod into her hub the other day, and up popped an alert saying it couldn’t be mounted because the bus was maxxed out on power. Turned out her hub has a little bus power/external power switch on the side that had found its way to the ‘bus power’ position. I flipped it to ‘external’; problem solved.
Power management, probably. Right click My Computer -> Properties -> Hardware Tab -> Device Manager. Got to the bottom and expand the Universal Serial Bus Controllers. Select USB Root Hub (2.0 sometimes), right-click -> Properties-> Power Management -> Uncheck “Allow the computer to turn of this device to save power”. Do that for any/all root hubs you may have. Press OK.
Flander! In the words of Minnie Pearl, for two cents I’d haul off and kiss you. I’ve been wondering what made my ports go to sleep, so that I had to reboot to print. Thank you so very much!
I have a similar problem with my iPod and my wireless network adapter, both of which are USB. (Adapter is plugged in to a USB port in the back of the PC, iPod plugs into a USB on the front.) If I plug the iPod in just to recharge it, I don’t have any problems. But as soon as I move something from iTunes into my iPod, I lose my internet connection. What’s weird is that the adapter still appears to have a connection to my wireless modem, but traffic just stops dead. I have to reboot in order to get my internet connection back. I’m guessing it’s not a power issue since it only seems to happen when I move files to the iPod?
This is a weird problem, but Google seems to find you’re not the only one with the problem.. This page has a possible solution. Another thought would be to see if there is an IRQ conflict. It’s a shot in the dark, but you can google “resolve conflicting IRQ” and get instructions on how to check your hardware and make changes if necessary. Hope this helps.
Flander - maybe you know the answer to this too - I frequently will plug in a USB 2.0-capable device into a USB 2.0 port and the computer will say “This device will perform faster if you use a 2.0 port” - but I am using one. My computer doesn’t even have a 1.1 port. Then some other time I’ll use the same device in the same port and it works as 2.0. Do you know why this would happen? And, of course, when transferring files on this supposed “1.1 port” it’s very slow.
