Weird USB problem

[shin_dr]

It seems like every so often the ports become unresponsive and my mouse and keyboard don't work. Usually I just swap them out and it works fine, but a while later the same thing happens again. Restarting turns things back to normal but it's pretty annoying.

It seems Flash is checking for updates around the time of most of them, but i don't know if it's that simple.


Device Manager doesn't show anything out of the ordinary. I ran one of Microsoft's little fixit things and that didn't seem to do much.

[AYHJA]

It has been a while, but this could be a 'ghost' device issue.

Long story short, sometimes, when you plug and unplug devices, different USB and hardware ID's are assigned. Windows will sometime forget to purge them, and you're stuck with an issue like yours.

The best thing to do is unplug them all, reboot into safe mode and then remove all of your USB controller devices from the device manager.

That should force a mass reset, and reassign devices as you plug them back in. Should be fixed, but if not not we have other tricks.

[shin_dr]

Well, last night I noticed a spike in temperature. I don't know if that's the root cause, but it sure doesn't help.

[shin_dr]

Looks like heat is the primary issue.

[shin_dr]

So far it seems the rest behaves if I limit use of one port and keep an eye on the fan speed during the afternoon.

I do have one of those Belkin 4-in-1 hubs in case I do need to connect multiple drives or such, but I don't want to push it at the moment.

[AYHJA]

Shit, that's not good Bro...

Have you given your machine one of those really thorough dustings with a couple cans of compressed air? Also, could be that your heat sink paste has deteriorated enough so that you have issues like yours. How old is this machine?

[shin_dr]

Everything else checks out fine, I'm hoping it's just a byproduct of the weather. The only other thing that's increased is playing games.

[shin_dr]

I switched mouses and haven't had the freeze happen since, so that seems taken care of.

The heat problem showed up again this morning though; it's over 100 outside so I can't rule out weather, but this is getting worrying.

I've got a lot of stuff backed up but not everything, and I might just need another external to share the load. (I was already thinking about one as a sort of media/games only, guess I need to plan for that sooner rather than later).

[AYHJA]

Shit man, no luck on cleaning out the dust bunnies? That heat is no bueno bud, you best have backups going...

[shin_dr]

I got a couple ideas about the room itself but I think I'm just going to have to be super vigilant about stuff for the next few weeks.