USB (Universal Serial Bus) repair page 2 (continued.......)

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How to trouble shoot a USB devices:

Sometimes you connect you favorite device and it just don't want to play today. I have a usb Joy stick that I like because it has three more functions than a regular joy stick. I like flight simulators, especially combat aircraft (wonder why). Any way some days it works as advertised some days it will not even show up in the game controllers.

One of the problems I have encountered with Universal Serial Bus devices is that the ISO Standard 1.1 and 2.0 have conflicts with some devices. Newer devices work fine on newer computers, but act up on older computers. No continuity with the backwards compatibility. There are two ways around this, one is fairly cheap and easy the other is costly.

You will find more information on USB Repair in the Self Computer Repair Unleashed! E-Book.

Older systems and Universal Serial Bus hubs. If your computer is older than three years old then the USB is defiantly version 1.1. If it is between two and three you have a 50-50 chance on it being ether one. Unfortunately you can not up grade the bios and take care of the problem. The problem is the USB controller chip on the main board.

So what can you do? Well you could upgrade all your hardware...very costly. Or you can add a USB 2.0 card to your system. You can get a card for either a desktop or a laptop. If you want you can disable the 1.1 ports through the bios or you can leave them turned on and have more ports. My desktop has eight ports, two 1.1 ports, six 2.0 ports.

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Don't have enough ports? Add a hub. A hub connects between the computer and the devices. They come in different sizes and are powered and non-powered. You can find them with two, four, or eight ports so far I haven't seen a 16 port yet.

Powered or non-powered?

Case in point:

I worked on a system that had a USB printer connected to it, some times it was ok some times it would only print a partial page. Dove me crazy for about a week, today it works tomorrow it won't. It was connected to a 2.0 ver port on a almost new computer. There were two other printers in the office but only this one was color so moving it was out of the question. I changed cables, I changed the port it was connected to. I uninstalled and reinstalled the print drivers. I asked if the user had stopped the printer with the "Safe to Remove Hardware" program, nope. Then one day I had my laptop with me when I went to see the user, in the computer bag I carried a powered hub, I put the hub between the computer and printer. No more problems.

Some times the port can not supply enough power for the device it is connecting to, laptops are especially prone to this problem. Another reason for using a powered hub is how many devices you have connected and how far the furtherest one is from the computer. USB specification does not give a maximum distance for a cable. I saw one computer the guy had three scanners, two printers, two external cd-rom's, and usb mouse and keyboard. Looked like a spider web. To over come the port problem he had two eight port usb powered hubs. He said he never had a problem with the setup.

Another problem I have over come with a powered usb hub is distance. A user had a small work space (you can't call them cubes any more) and need to connect to printer that was about fifteen feet away. The longest usb cable I could find was eight feet. Two eight feet cables would reach the printer. With the hub in between the cables I could reach the printer.

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