USB Error

I?ve been tempted lately to buy a new laptop, but as always, I?m not too keen on parting with my money! I wanted a new one to replace my current laptop which has seen better days and has a few problems and it?s always nice to have a new toy.

The thing is that my current laptop works fine and runs all the applications I need, but has a major fault. The USB ports don?t work very well and will randomly stop working which is annoying as I use a USB mouse all the time. I?d have to unplug the mouse then re-insert it and hope it worked again, although I was often greeted with an ?unknown device? error pop-up.

I?ve yanked the USB ports quite a bit by tripping over cables etc plugged in them and I assumed this was the fault and so it was a hardware issue, but I was wrong. I?d previously gone through my device manager in control panel and had looked out for faults but couldn?t see anything obviously wrong and had left it, but today browsing through there I had noticed something odd.

There were multiple USB hubs and controllers listed, 3 of each in fact which was odd, and I assumed that I should only have 2 listed as I only have 2 USB ports, but which 2 did I need? I connected my camera to one USB port and the mouse was in the other port, and so I clicked on the properties of the hubs to see which ones showed up my devices. Surprise. The devices were actually listed only on one hub which meant that 2 were not needed and so I disabled them, and happily my USB ports were still working! I then systematically disabled the USB controllers which allowed me to find out which ones were needed for the USB ports.

Now I?m back down to the correct amount of hubs and controllers, and the ports are working brilliantly again! I can only assume that the multiple hubs and controllers were causing a conflict, but I?m still not sure how it happened, but don?t really care as the laptop is all fine. This will have an effect on my decision on getting a new laptop as I don?t really need a new one now and instead I should really go through this one and try and clean it up, both on the software and file management side as well as its physical appearance which is a grubby and dusty.

So there we go, lots of money saved. My head was going round in circles anyway about which laptop to buy and so it?s saved me some mental anguish too.