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Gandolf
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windows 8 USB problems

Tue Feb 18, 2014 10:57 pm

I have windows 8 and occasionally my mouse and keyboard shut off, and even after restarting the PC once windows loads it shuts off all USB devices. The backlite shuts off. They work in the bios. What can the problem be?
 
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Re: windows 8 USB problems

Tue Feb 18, 2014 11:00 pm

Sounds like the problem I've been having. Some Intel chipsets don't wake up USB 3.0 devices properly. The solution is to use your USB 2.0 ports for everything. I'm waiting for a larger sample space before I declare victory, but I think this works, though it's not really a victory because it means 3/4 of my USB ports are useless.
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Deanjo
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Re: windows 8 USB problems

Tue Feb 18, 2014 11:02 pm

Gandolf wrote:
I have windows 8 and occasionally my mouse and keyboard shut off, and even after restarting the PC once windows loads it shuts off all USB devices. The backlite shuts off. They work in the bios. What can the problem be?


Intel USB 3 ports?
 
Gandolf
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Re: windows 8 USB problems

Tue Feb 18, 2014 11:17 pm

I currently have keyboard and mouse plugged into the 2.0 ports.
I should also say this problem has persisted even after changing motherboard/cpu and a new windows 8 install.
I just tried changing the mouse, I will see if that changes anything. I do see a lot of people have had the same issues in the past though.
 
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Re: windows 8 USB problems

Tue Feb 18, 2014 11:23 pm

Maybe chipset driver updates? In my experience, doing a chipset driver update sometimes fixes the problem. Sometimes getting the chipset driver from the motherboard manufacturer rather than the generic one for your chipset from intel, Via, etc makes a difference. Computers are weird. I remember back on an old Pentium 1 I had a problem getting a PCI device to work, and the solution was putting it into a different PCI slot, even though everything else worked just fine in the problem slot.
 
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Re: windows 8 USB problems

Wed Feb 19, 2014 4:55 am

I don't know that this will be much help, but you could try plugging your various USB thingies into sockets run by different controllers.

I have a SteelSeries mouse (a CODBlopsII branded sensei RAW I got for 1/2 price because no one wants them) that stopped working when I got a bluetooth dongle for use with a Playstation 3 controller. Once I plugged the BT adapter in, the mouse wouldn't work after startup unless I removed it and plugged it back in. I then moved the mouse to a USB 3.0 port and the problem disappeared.
 
Deanjo
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Re: windows 8 USB problems

Wed Feb 19, 2014 6:48 am

I guess grab a live linux distro and boot it up and test there. That will isolate if it is a hardware issue or OS issue.

(It will also provide you with better logs if a failure to negotiate with the devices occurs)
 
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Re: windows 8 USB problems

Wed Feb 19, 2014 7:46 am

Deanjo wrote:
I guess grab a live linux distro and boot it up and test there. That will isolate if it is a hardware issue or OS issue.

Depending on how often it happens this might take a while. I suppose he could surf the web on Linux for a while to give it a good workout.

I've also seen Linux have problems with USB 3.0 ports on some systems, so doing the testing using the USB 2.0 ports (since the OP's problem seems to happen on the 2.0 ports as well) would be a good idea.

Another possibility is that one of the devices is malfunctioning and drawing too much current, causing the USB controller's over-current protection to trip.

Does the problem still happen if the devices are plugged through a powered hub?
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Gandolf
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Re: windows 8 USB problems

Wed Feb 19, 2014 10:37 am

Guys apparently this is a known issue in windows 8 and 8.1.
There are usb Driver crashes that happens in windows and it will shut off that usb port. You can hook up a ps2 keyboard go in and uninstall and reinstall the device. But the problem will happen again.
When I searched the issue online I found a ton of people having the same problem. Aparently there is still no fix from Microsoft. I am not sure if certain devices are affected or if it is all USB. Apparently though the problem got big last July during a microsoft driver update.
 
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Re: windows 8 USB problems

Wed Feb 19, 2014 12:23 pm

I typically only use USB3.0 ports with 3.0 devices. I honestly don't know if it makes much difference, but then again, there's no benefit to using a 2.0 device in a 3.0 port, and most motherboards still have a plethora of 2.0 ports available. So why not go 2.0 to 2.0 and avoid any problems, however unlikely?

I also use a powered hub for most of my low bandwidth or higher power-draw devices (keyboard, MS Gaming Receiver, etc). The MS Receiver in particular seems to be a high power-draw device, as it caused issues with more than one of my past builds. The powered hub eliminates those problems.
 
Gandolf
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Re: windows 8 USB problems

Wed Feb 19, 2014 2:29 pm

This issue has nothing to do with USB 3.0
 
Deanjo
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Re: windows 8 USB problems

Sat Feb 22, 2014 2:57 pm

just brew it! wrote:
I've also seen Linux have problems with USB 3.0 ports on some systems,


You shouldn't see any issues using a kernel from the last year or so (you may see however a few workaround messages due to errata and bad device side implementations).

And BTW, a lot of same issues are found in Windows but are left unfixed (such as USB 3.0 devices reporting connected but are actually negotiating at 2.0).
 
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Re: windows 8 USB problems

Sat Feb 22, 2014 3:32 pm

Deanjo wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
I've also seen Linux have problems with USB 3.0 ports on some systems,

You shouldn't see any issues using a kernel from the last year or so (you may see however a few workaround messages due to errata and bad device side implementations).

Yeah, I suppose I should've noted that this was on Ubuntu 12.04, so nearly a 2 year old kernel at this point. IIRC there was a workaround involving unloading and reloading the driver or somesuch, which I just ended up adding to rc.local so that it would run automatically on bootup.

Something else I've noticed with USB 3.0 is that passing devices connected to a USB 3.0 port in to a VirtualBox VM does not work well, even if the device connected to the port is a USB 2/1 device. So if you do virtualization, you may want to plug any devices that need to be directly accessible to the VMs into USB 2.0 ports. (Virtualized keyboard/mouse don't count since there's another translation layer in between. I'm talking about devices you want the VM to access natively.)
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Deanjo
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Re: windows 8 USB problems

Sat Feb 22, 2014 3:56 pm

just brew it! wrote:
Something else I've noticed with USB 3.0 is that passing devices connected to a USB 3.0 port in to a VirtualBox VM does not work well, even if the device connected to the port is a USB 2/1 device. So if you do virtualization, you may want to plug any devices that need to be directly accessible to the VMs into USB 2.0 ports. (Virtualized keyboard/mouse don't count since there's another translation layer in between. I'm talking about devices you want the VM to access natively.)


Virtualbox just sucks at USB period, always has. It has never done USB well and forget about using passthru for anything but keyboard/mouse and basic storage. It's the primary reason why I use VMware workstation or Parallels. In fact until the most recent release, you would get a BSOD if trying to enable passthru with a Windows 8/8.1 host.
 
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Re: windows 8 USB problems

Sat Feb 22, 2014 4:10 pm

Deanjo wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
Something else I've noticed with USB 3.0 is that passing devices connected to a USB 3.0 port in to a VirtualBox VM does not work well, even if the device connected to the port is a USB 2/1 device. So if you do virtualization, you may want to plug any devices that need to be directly accessible to the VMs into USB 2.0 ports. (Virtualized keyboard/mouse don't count since there's another translation layer in between. I'm talking about devices you want the VM to access natively.)

Virtualbox just sucks at USB period, always has. It has never done USB well and forget about using passthru for anything but keyboard/mouse and basic storage. It's the primary reason why I use VMware workstation or Parallels. In fact until the most recent release, you would get a BSOD if trying to enable passthru with a Windows 8/8.1 host.

The USB 2.0 passthrough isn't that bad these days. I sometimes use Linux on VirtualBox (on a Windows 7 host) to program microcontrollers at work.
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