[georgebrochill]

Hi,
Im am using an Acer Aspire 3050 1733 laptop with a Mobile AMD Sempron 3400+ processor. I have had it since Nov. 2007 and recently it has been having a problem with USB devices. When I plug a device into the computer, the computer seems to recognize that something has been plugged in but shortly after, an error message pops up. The computer came with Windows Vista Home edition, I reformatted the laptop with Windows XP Pro, and then reformatted with Vista Ultimate. None of this has helped. I also looked in the bios but found nothing. The problem is not with the device that I'm plugging in since I receive an error regardless as to what I plug in, ie. flash drive, camera, mp3 player... If anyone has any ideas as to how to fix this problem, please help! An image of the error message has been posted below.

Thanks for any help.

 

[deleted122510]

Hi -

Do you have all necessary drivers for your devices that you're trying to use? have you tried the device manager?

Have you tried Windows troubleshooting (this was a joke..)

 

[dai]

in the device manager click on view at the top and in the dropdown
show hidden devices
then uninstall all listed usb items
turn the computer off
unplug usb plugs
reboot twice
replug in the usb plugs

 

[georgebrochill]

thanks, I followed your directions exactly dai, and yes I have all the drivers for these devices, as they worked one day and stopped the next, plus were things like flash drives which windows recognized anyway - still no success. When the computer comes back from the restarts it immediately says it can't recognize the usb device as previously posted(with nothing being plugged in), then tries to install drivers for the device automatically and says device drivers have successfully been installed and device is ready to be used, but then can't see anything I plug into it. Also right after the second restart I went to the device manager and it already had an unknown device under the usb ports??

Any other help is greatly appreciated, I'm stuck and frustrated!

Also when this first happened there was a sd card in the card reader. Would this have anything to do with what may have caused this?

 

[deleted122510]

"sd card in the card reader"

Depends, what was on it?

 

[dai]

try a cmos reset on it

check pnp and usb2 enabled in the bios and usb on boot

 

[georgebrochill]

only thing on the sd card was pictures i took from my own camera. I never put it in anything else but my own camera and this computer.

Not exactly sure what a cmos reset is dai, but my BIOS is super lame with hardly any options in it. There aren't even USB. Could it be anything hardware related like a partial connection or broken pins or something, because it is a laptop could something maybe have gotten bumped partially loose? I know there is still some kind of a connection because when I plug a device into any usb slot it says "usb device not recognized"

 

[Madcatz]

In your device manager, do you have a standard enchanced PCI to USB controller? If so, disable it, restart, and try the USB ports again.

My work computer had the same problem, BIOS updates, resets, fresh windows installs didn't work, disabling that one device and the USB ports work fine now.

 

[georgebrochill]

Also USB's are enabled in the BIOS starting at 5th level priority is USB HDD, then 6th USB cd-rom, 7th USB floppy, 8th USB key

If that helps anything? Would a change in the boot level priority change anything?

Madcatz I don't have anything labeled exactly like that, but I do have 5 of these:
"PCI standard PCI-to-PCI bridge"
and I also have something labeled almost exactly what my USB ports are labeled.

In system devices I've got a:
"ATI I/O Communications Processor LPC Controller"
"ATI I/O Communications Processor PCI Bus Controller"
"ATI I/O Communications Processor SMBus Controller"

In device manager my USB ports are called:
"ATI I/O Communications Processor USB 1.1 OHCI Controller"
"ATI I/O Communications Processor USB 1.1 OHCI Controller"
"ATI I/O Communications Processor USB 2.O EHCI Controller"

Would disabling any of those things in my system devices change anything and should there be 5 of those PCI-to-PCI bridges in there??

Thanks

 

[Madcatz]

Changing boot order wouldn't change anything but the order of devices the computer boots to first.

the PCI to PCI won't be the ones causing the problem, it would be listed under the USB devices in device manager.

The two 1.1 OHCI controllers, and the 2.0 EHCI is what you should have, and probably 3 USB Root Hubs. Disabling those shouldn't fix the problem. It doesn't look like the fix is in the device manager.

check out this KB entry from microsoft:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941996

If the KB still doesn't work, can you right click the USB device in device manager, choose to update driver, locate the driver manually, go to c:\windows\system32\drivers, or c:\windows\Inf and the driver should be in there.