1. Front USB ports in every machine I looked at had the wrong wiring. The wire was suitable for USB 1.1 but not 2.0 speeds.
2. USB ports do and can fail. Cheap fix is to install an USB PCI card.
3. You can attempt rebooting, reloading the OS and drivers, but I don't have the time for that and install a card.
Bob
Hi guys, not sure if this has been addressed fully elsewhere, but think it might be a bit variant anyway.
I have an Advent 3214. it has two USB ports on the front, then on the back there are two up the top and two down the bottom.
These were all working fine up until last night, when i unplugged my wifi card and then plugged it back in (i've been using a little usb plug in card for my internet access). as soon as i did this, a message popped up saying something like the device has malfunctioned and is not recognised.
at first i thought it was just the card, but then i noticed my external hard drive was no longer being picked up. both of these two have been plugged in the front recently.
so then i tried my sd card and reader, and no luck - so i tried it in every usb port - USB Device Not Recognised. The weird thing is, my keyboard is plugged in to the bottom left USB on the back (with the mouse plugged in through it) and it works fine. Nothing else will work from this port though.
i even tried plugging the wifi card into the spare USB slot on the keyboard, and it recognised it at first, but then because it was going through the keyboard, it said there wasn't enough power to run it.
As you can probably tell, this has got me really frustrated now. Any help from any of you guys would be amazing - thanks in advance!
(by the way, i tried uninstalling all the USB drivers and then rebooted with the drivers disc in - it then reinstalled all the drivers for the USB slots, but still get the same message)

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