issues with Dell Precision M6300

[jeffmoss26]

Having a very weird problem with one of the laptops at work...all of a sudden, the USB ports are not working properly. The devices power on but do not work.
I've tried flash drives, USB hard drives, and mice; it is trying to find drivers which do not exist for these things.
When I go into device manager, I get a yellow question mark next to the device that is plugged in, and it says 'this device is not configured correctly'.
I called Dell and the only thing they could recommend is doing a BIOS update, this computer is from 2008. He is running Windows XP SP3 if that helps.

I was able to get USB drives working this morning...copied the I386 file from an XP cd to the hard drive and updated drivers once I plugged a flash drive and hard drive in. However, I am still unable to get any USB mouse to work. It goes through the same driver thing, I install the drivers from C:\I386 and appears to install correctly, but the mouse does not function.

Called Dell again and they suggested updating the chipset drivers first, and then the BIOS.

Any help would be appreciated!

jeff moss

 

[goombawaho]

they suggested updating the chipset drivers first, and then the BIOS

Wouldn't hurt at all to do this, but...

What about a system restore to a time when it was working normally with USB devices. If you can get it to roll back and work, I'd still do the chipset and bios updates AGAIN.

 

[BadBigBen]

Ah, the venerable USB bug hit another one...

Things you could attempt, if you did not already:

1. Cut the power from the wall outlet to the PC (e.g. removing the powercord from the PSU), then hold the powerbutten until it drained the power from the mainboard (about a minute or so)...
hook the power back up and see if the PC will recognize the USB devices correctly again...

2. on certain constellations of hardware, the USB driver on XP SP3 does not enumerate the USB devices correctly, the only fix that I am aware of, was to replace the driver with the SP2 version...

3. see if method 2 or 3, in the following article, are of any help to you:

A USB 2.0 hub may stop working when you disconnect a USB 2.0 printer from your Windows XP-based computer

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;895962

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
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