USB erratic after update a couple weeks ago

Durn thing has a mind of its own. Whole groups of USB ports turn
themselves on & off every 10 minutes now.

This seems to be a possible explanation/fix:

[ Re: USB stops working after recent Windows Update
It is more of a hardware problem believe it or not. The thing is that
some motherboards have internal watchdogs to make sure that USB ports
are not overloaded since they consume on average 500 mA of current. This
mechanism of kicking off some additional USB ports also involves the OS,
or course. What perhaps happened was that after some updates the demand
on the MB went up because of some additional work Vista needs to do now
perhaps on a short term basis (like for a few minutes) and it just trips
over the threshold.]

What I did is... I had 2 USB hubs daisy chained in one port of the
'puter, so I plugged each individually into a port... at least some of
the probs seem to have resolved. Of course I had it set up that way for
a reason... some devices only worked plugged direct to the 'puter but
who knows, maybe that's not a problem now? Er, yeah, still a problem but
some more port switching seems to resolve partly. USB voodoo...

--
Paul Furman



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