I bought my father a 10 port USB hub from Plugable via Amazon.
My dad (who’s 1500 miles away) reports that occasionally on some mornings he arrives to find his laptop’s USB keyboard and other devices have frozen. Hub is probably 90 days old, and started about 30 days in. While I’m not there, he doesn’t just buy new devices and plug them in. At some point in the mix, however, he did get a new iphone. I ruled that out when I made sure he wasn’t leaving it plugged in overnight).
It only happens sometimes (about 2-3x a week), and the computer functions fine at the laptop, just not devices directly in the hub until after a reboot (which is what he tries first, not b/c that’s well solved for). He has 2 computers, one each with this USB hub that are the same computer, same hub (although devices plugged in are different). Only has the problem with 1 hub.
Despite 90% of the time problems are in the software, I’m starting to suspect hardware due to the intermittent nature. Possibly something with the draw on the USB hub, or something along those lines. For $25, I’m just going to buy him another hub at least for a spare (same plugable hub – I have many of them, they’re great). There’s nothing in the Windows 7 admin tools that lead me to some driver type of issue as of yet. But I’m just starting.
Unfortunately he’s not super technical, he’s remote, and there’s a zillion things it could be. If this hardware swap doesn’t work out, I’m just wondering if someone here can provide me a common list of things that I should consider. I haven’t seen anything in a search of the forum here.
It’s a Dell Inspiron 17" laptop. The Plugable hub is the one with 10 ports. I think only about 6 ports are currently in use. Some are plugged directly into the laptop and those seem to be fine when this happens. We were at first swapping devices between the hub and the built-in laptop ports, but that wasn’t scientific enough to nail down the devices. Devices include a 2nd usb monitor, a USB hard drive, a wired keyboard, a wireless mouse, a USB cam, the iphone, and a printer.