I had a really bad problem with USB today that I want to blog about (with my resolution) before it spins out of my head.
I am using a USB wireless mouse. It started acting flakey today — doing things like not reacting to mouse clicks and then lagging a lot when I was moving it around the screen. I rebooted a few times but it didn’t help. I then went to a hardwired mouse that worked properly for a few minutes than was flaky in a different way. For example, I move the mouse down on the screen then suddenly it would be at the top of the screen.
For the short term it meant that I had to do my first TechEd presentation with a touch pad which was bad news for me.
So I have spent the last few hours fiddling around with this. I thought perhaps it was my USB port, but was happy to see that my thumb drive and external drive (which I am 100% dependent on for my Indigo talk) was working. My powerpoint clicker, another USB pointing device was also failing. The failure was a) a windows message saying that the USB device failed and b) they stopped working all together!
Nothing made sense so no point in going through all of the things I tried…but what I ended up doing that worked was after noticing that in Device Manager, I had the extended USB hub manager and 4 other usb hub managers with usb devices, I disabled all but one of the 4 hub managers.
The LaCie drive was still working, but when I put the thumbdrive in the 2nd usb port, it didn’t work. Well, flaky – windows explorer said there is a D: but I couldn’t read it.
Then I reenabled the 2nd of those 4 usb managers with no effect. But when I reenabled the third, my thumbdrive worked and after I stopped and removed it and plugged in the mouse, that too worked.
Hours of needless aggravation and I still want to prep for tomorrows talks! But I know from experience that staying up all hours is a very bad thing for conference prep. I will be much better off going to bed, getting a decent night’s sleep and then hammering in the morning.
(written 12:30 am Tuesday morning but posted later)
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