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USB on Gateway Laptop stopped working

A

adek011

Junior Member
I have a Gateway 3520 Laptop and it has been working fine until recently. I plugged in my ipod and then the entire laptop went dead. I could not even turn it on for a few minutes. After it finally turned on it will not recognize any USB devices that I plug in, whether it is an ipod, thumb drive, anything. It gives me an error saying USB Device not recognized. I have formatted the laptop and when I still get the same error after installing and updating all the necessary drivers. Does anyone have any idea whatsoever on what may be wrong? I did plug in a usb thumb drive from a friend that seemed to work for a moment (before I reformatted). Also, I read somewhere that it may be the motherboard bios but I do not know where to find the updates on Gateway's site. Thanks in advance.
 
This unfortunately sounds like a catastrophic problem in the USB port power supply circuit on your laptop, and not a BIOS or other configuration problem. Usually systems have a single chip which supplies (and limits) current for 4 or 8 USB ports supplied by a system. It seems as though this chip may have failed catastrophically in your laptop. Subsequently, devices which draw their power from the bus (e.g., mice, webcams, etc) would fail to be recognized because they aren't drawing enough power to operate correctly.

Have you tried plugging in a self-powered USB device (i.e., one that has its own AC adapter, like a USB hard drive)? Self-powered devices may still work on your laptop because they don't draw any current over the bus, and might help you confirm that the bus power supply chip is to blame. Because the USB power supply chip is a separate component, it is entirely possible for that part to fail while the USB controller itself continues to function normally. (Just make sure that when you test this out, that you power up the device BEFORE connecting it to your laptop, or else it will draw power over the laptop, which is what you are trying to avoid.)

 
Thanks for the reply. I just plugged in my USB hard drive into my laptop and it works but it keeps getting disconnected and reloading. So I guess the power supply chip is fried. I ordered a PCMCIA usb card to use, it should work fine right? Also, after I formatted my laptop, everything seems to be running really slow and I can't figure out why. I've looked at the task manager to see if there is anything hogging the memory but nothing is showing up. Could you recommend some sort of software that will diagnose any memory hogs or cpu hogs? Maybe I should just give up on this laptop and buy a new one. Its a 1.6 ghz Pentium M with only 756mb of Ram.
 
Yes a pcmcia card should work just fine.

As for the slowness, have you updated the drivers, especially video and chipset?

Also check for bios updates, and make sure if it was a restore cd that you used that you remove their crapware from startup. Other things to check are to make sure that the drive isnt running in pio mode. Last make sure since its a mobile chip that its actually running at the right frequency. Sometimes if the drivers for the chipset arent installed speedstep can act wonky
 
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