Posting in this sub-forum because my suspicion is that it's a motherboard failure...but don't know for sure. Would much prefer it was the psu.
All the USB ports (4 front, 6 back, usb 3 and 2) became unreliable, almost overnight.
They will no longer work for flash drives (or digital music players), but still work for mouse and keyboard and external HDD (which has own power supply).
At first they would work _once_ when a flash drive was first plugged-in, but then after ejecting it, they would not work again till a hard-reboot. Then after a day of this they stopped working even on first insertion.
Tried umpteen flash drives.
A big problem is if I _do_ plug a flash drive in, not only is it not accessible (though it is identified as a drive, the volume just can't be 'populated') but from then on other things malfunction - hardware monitor won't run, nor will disk manager, both just display blank pages, windows explorer stops refreshing automatically after a file is renamed or deleted (requires manual refresh to update the window) and the PC can't be restarted or shut down, it needs a hard reboot. Only a hard reset will get things back to 'normal' again.
As long as I don't insert any usb flash drives the PC works perfectly well.
After a flash drive access failure event viewer shows 'user mode driver crash' and 'WSearch timed out' errors.
My suspicion is that some capacitor or something on the mobo has given up the ghost, and hence the USB ports can't provide enough power for flash memory devices (but can still manage keyboards etc). It would be far better if it were just a dying PSU, but when hardware monitor does run it shows all voltages being perfectly normal.
Anyone have any ideas whether it is likely to be the mobo or the psu?
Thanks.
(I've tried everything I can think of wrt to drivers and windows update, to no effect - I don't think it's a software issue).
All the USB ports (4 front, 6 back, usb 3 and 2) became unreliable, almost overnight.
They will no longer work for flash drives (or digital music players), but still work for mouse and keyboard and external HDD (which has own power supply).
At first they would work _once_ when a flash drive was first plugged-in, but then after ejecting it, they would not work again till a hard-reboot. Then after a day of this they stopped working even on first insertion.
Tried umpteen flash drives.
A big problem is if I _do_ plug a flash drive in, not only is it not accessible (though it is identified as a drive, the volume just can't be 'populated') but from then on other things malfunction - hardware monitor won't run, nor will disk manager, both just display blank pages, windows explorer stops refreshing automatically after a file is renamed or deleted (requires manual refresh to update the window) and the PC can't be restarted or shut down, it needs a hard reboot. Only a hard reset will get things back to 'normal' again.
As long as I don't insert any usb flash drives the PC works perfectly well.
After a flash drive access failure event viewer shows 'user mode driver crash' and 'WSearch timed out' errors.
My suspicion is that some capacitor or something on the mobo has given up the ghost, and hence the USB ports can't provide enough power for flash memory devices (but can still manage keyboards etc). It would be far better if it were just a dying PSU, but when hardware monitor does run it shows all voltages being perfectly normal.
Anyone have any ideas whether it is likely to be the mobo or the psu?
Thanks.
(I've tried everything I can think of wrt to drivers and windows update, to no effect - I don't think it's a software issue).