I also had a constant "usb device not recognized" error - while nothing was plugged in. I was on the phone with Dell forever. Finally a rep told me it was surely a spyware issue and she would need to remove it for a $129 fee. When I hesitated, she basically told me that this was a serious issue and was destroying my hard drive as we speak. I hung up, went to a search engine and did a broad search. This problem was everywhere - and not nearly as rare and dangerous as she indicated. There were all kinds of forums on tech sites for this same problem, and much advice on what to do. What worked? It sounds dumb, but a few people posted similar solutions, which was basically just to power down AND UNPLUG for several minutes. Reboot and problem gone. The explanations for why it works were a little different, but although I had rebooted, I never unplugged it. One explanation was as follows:
"Note that this does not mean just turning off your computer because modern computers don’t really turn off when you press the power button as the motherboard still gets power... First to explain, the motherboard is where all of hardware of the computer is connected to, including the USB ports. Sometimes the motherboard needs to be “rebooted” also because something can go wrong, i.e. all your USB ports suddenly stop working. The small microprocessor on the motherboard will reload the drivers and your USB ports should be back to recognizing all devices!"
I don't know enough about this stuff to know if that's true. All I know is that it worked. So simple. Another solution involved realizing that one of the pins in the usb port was bent, or some other debris was in there - so it's reading that a device is plugged in. That solution worked for others. Long story short... it's probably something silly like that. The sites that helped me were tomshardware.com and online-tech-tips.com. Good luck.
colin8
1 Message
0
January 18th, 2010 00:00
LaptopNomad
539 Posts
0
January 18th, 2010 08:00
Get Windows out of the equation - and try again. If it occurs again it's most likely hardware / firmware related.
First of all USB tries to figure out the type USB1 / USB2 - it's known in the USB industry as "chirping".
Chirping last just for 10 ms - and if gone sour it can pop-up the warning. It's a very simple mechanism.
charliedog03901
1 Message
0
January 26th, 2010 20:00
I also had a constant "usb device not recognized" error - while nothing was plugged in. I was on the phone with Dell forever. Finally a rep told me it was surely a spyware issue and she would need to remove it for a $129 fee. When I hesitated, she basically told me that this was a serious issue and was destroying my hard drive as we speak. I hung up, went to a search engine and did a broad search. This problem was everywhere - and not nearly as rare and dangerous as she indicated. There were all kinds of forums on tech sites for this same problem, and much advice on what to do. What worked? It sounds dumb, but a few people posted similar solutions, which was basically just to power down AND UNPLUG for several minutes. Reboot and problem gone. The explanations for why it works were a little different, but although I had rebooted, I never unplugged it. One explanation was as follows:
"Note that this does not mean just turning off your computer because modern computers don’t really turn off when you press the power button as the motherboard still gets power... First to explain, the motherboard is where all of hardware of the computer is connected to, including the USB ports. Sometimes the motherboard needs to be “rebooted” also because something can go wrong, i.e. all your USB ports suddenly stop working. The small microprocessor on the motherboard will reload the drivers and your USB ports should be back to recognizing all devices!"
I don't know enough about this stuff to know if that's true. All I know is that it worked. So simple. Another solution involved realizing that one of the pins in the usb port was bent, or some other debris was in there - so it's reading that a device is plugged in. That solution worked for others. Long story short... it's probably something silly like that. The sites that helped me were tomshardware.com and online-tech-tips.com. Good luck.