Flaky USB ports

[Kutter]

Hi all,

Everyone here is always so helpful, so I thought I'd bring my own personal problem to the boards to see if anyone has any ideas.

I have a lot of USB connected 'stuff' I have one of these:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Razer-Tartarus-Expert-membrane-Gaming/dp/B00ELGHM8C

One of these:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Thrustmaste...&ie=UTF8&qid=1435913131&sr=1-1&keywords=rs500

One of these:

http://uk.focusrite.com/usb-audio-interfaces/scarlett-18i8

AND

A 360 wired controller, and a Razr Mouse, and a Netgear wireless USB for my internet connection.

So as you can see, a LOT of stuff...

My problem is, I simply cant seem to get everything to work all the time. Examples:

1. Sometimes on boot my mouse doesnt work (reboot needed)

2. Sometimes on boot the sound doesn't work (reboot needed)

3. Sometimes the sound drops when playing games, and strangely this is also in conjunction with another problem... Namely

4. The Wheel just stops working

5. On boot, the wheel never started working in the first place. (sometimes solved with a unplug re-plug of the USB connected but more often than not a full reboot)

6. On boot, the internet connection dongle simply seems to not exist (and doesn't connect), as if the machine doesn't know its plugged in. (This is solved with a quick unplug and plug back in again (of the dongle)

The only item (as far as I know) that works 100% of the time is the Razr Tarterus controller.

Anyone have ANY idea as to why I have these VERY intermittent problems? I would say, the PC has one of these problems every couple of days.. The rest of the time it runs fine.

 

[goombawaho]

I wouldn't know how to analyze the problem to a root cause unless you wanted to decrease the number of devices and try different combinations followed by reboots, but there are many combinations to teste. I bet this would fix it:
Link

I would plug mouse, keyboard and sound card directly into PC and everything else on the hub.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[Nelviticus]

This is a wild stab in the dark but my guess is you could be saturating the USB bandwidth. I don't know anything about that Focusrite audio thing but I bet it - and the wireless adapter - send a lot of data traffic. Make sure they're both connected to different USB sockets on your PC and don't go through a hub. If your motherboard has more than one USB controller, try to plug them into sockets on different controllers.

If that isn't it, try updating your motherboard's drivers. It could be a bug in the USB controller driver which has been fixed in a later release.

Nelviticus

 

[cdogg]

I have seen a similar issue in a few Z820 workstations I support. They originally came with the lower-end 850W power supply, and we had two AMD W7000 FirePro cards in each system. Although the system would boot, the keyboard, mouse, or both wouldn't be working. It turns out that due to the number of devices sucking power in the system, very little was left over for each USB port. When I disconnected a few of the other USB devices, the keyboard and mouse stopped having issues. We eventually ended up upgrading the power supplies to the beefier 1125W version and haven't had an issue since with everything connected.

So, first thing I would look at is your power supply rating and the number of components you have installed internally. If you have a high-end video card (or multiple) with more than one hard drive, you might be hitting the same limit. As Goom suggests, a powered USB hub might be the easy way out with the other option to upgrade your power supply. Start by unplugging a few devices before powering the system on to see if that makes any difference.

-Carl
"The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty: it's twice as big as it needs to be."

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[Kutter]

Thanks to you all...

I wondered myself if it were the capacity of the PSU that was causing me problems it's only a 650 but its a Corsair Gold one, so in theory it 'should' be ok...

I have tried unplugging stuff for the record, and I did use a hub for about a week until it blew up an xbox 360 controller! No messin - Blew it, massive loud pop!

I am fairly sure the problem exists when I have fewer things plugged in, although I will change the PSU (I have a larger one in another machine) to see if that fixes it up.

Thanks again, I will let you know how this turns out.

 

[cdogg]

Just out of curiosity here, what are the rest of your system's specs? Video card(s), hard drive(s), CPU, optical drive(s), etc.?