Reactive USB Troubleshooting
If you have a reasonably recent motherboard and have taken the steps described in the preceding section, your USB experience may well be trouble-free. Despite all efforts, however, you may one day be bitten by a USB conflict. If that happens, we suggest as a first step that you review the suggestions in the preceding section. For example, in the interval since you prepared the system, the motherboard maker may have released an updated BIOS, or later firmware versions may now be available for some or all of your USB peripherals. If so, download and install them.
Tip
Before you begin fiddling with your system, take a moment to visit the web sites for your computer or motherboard and your USB peripherals. You may find information there that will save a lot of useless mucking about. Most computer, motherboard, and USB peripheral vendors have detailed USB troubleshooting pages on their sites. You may find updated drivers, workarounds for specific problems, warnings about conflicts with specific devices, and so on.
Microsoft also provides some very useful information on its site about version-specific USB issues. We won’t attempt to list specific pages because Microsoft frequently changes its site, but if you visit http://www.microsoft.com, choose the Search function, and search for the string “USB troubleshooting.” You will find numerous useful pages.
If, having verified each of the preceeding items, you are still having problems with USB, there are several ...
Get PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
