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Out of necessity ( I am developing video appliocation and need more than one webcam) - my cheap webcams did not come with driver for win 2000 - I switched to XP (SONY home edition).
I heve an external USB drive which holds all my development archive.
This drive and other USB devices worked and attached to my Windows 2000 via D-link hub and switch box ( I have two dev mashines) just fine and every time (on powerup).
Now I need to restart the XP often before the Disk Manager "registers" the external drive.
I tryed motherboard USB ports ( back and front)and PCI USB (5 ports) card. Same results.
I have these devices on the USB - 4 webcams, external drive,USB hub with serial port adapter( ham radio), scanner, MS wireless keboard / mouse.flash drive. All of them have some intermittent issues.
I guess the qestion is - how to debug USB and find out what is happenning here.
Once I got some message about "bandwith 70% usage" problem but I have no clue what to do with it.
It wants me to "unplug" device which is stupid because if it slows dow I do not care, my apps is bulid with checks for that.
Anyway, could someone kindly shed some light on this USB behavior.
Thanks for reading.
Vaclav
PS All of the devices worked on Win 2000, some of them are powered, it cannot be a power issue.
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XP changed the way drives load in order to speed up the boot process. Now, you get a GUI up in about 4 seconds, thats completely useless for 26 seconds because none of the HW is attached yet, and explorer is locked waiting for the network to connect.
This is clearly an improvement over 2k, where you just waited 30 seconds for the GUI to come up...
Anyway, USB, where to start... OK, it sucks. Its the lamest, buggiest, lest observed standardwise, most indifferently supported at hub level protocol ever seen.
Advice? For gods sake dont use Vista, its worse. As for XP, what does device manager say when the USB drive has not been recognised?
"It is a remarkable fact that despite the worldwide expenditure of perhaps US$50 billion since 1990, and the efforts of tens of thousands of scientists worldwide, no human climate signal has yet been detected that is distinct from natural variation."
Bob Carter, Research Professor of Geology, James Cook University, Townsville
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Thanks for reply.
I foolishly though it was only XP SP3 problem!
And it is not only on startup!
In addition of "ignoring" USB hub at statup I have also observed that unplugging / plugging directly connected ( not via D link) devices is also ignored by XP.
I needed to switch to XP so I can use Logitech webcams, no other reason.
The biggest problem is that I have wireless keyboard / mouse also connected via the D-link hub!
For all practical purposes my USB is useless in XP.
My personal opinion - MS is in hardware development business and should stay there.
I always say the reason that CD was "invented" was because it was impractical to load Windows using two dozen 3 1/2 floppies!
They obviously have no business in operating system development since they cannot get it together after all these years.
Too bad general public does not see that.
If Windows 2011 will make coffee they will all line up for it!
Vaclav
PS I'll check the Device Manager next time.
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Yeah, check device manager. You will see a great big yellow exclamaitn mark on the fialed device.
Also, how does the HW work on other laptops? Becauae god knows USB host controllers can be very VERY variable in quality so dont blame MS, they just make the OS, its someone else made the HW...
"It is a remarkable fact that despite the worldwide expenditure of perhaps US$50 billion since 1990, and the efforts of tens of thousands of scientists worldwide, no human climate signal has yet been detected that is distinct from natural variation."
Bob Carter, Research Professor of Geology, James Cook University, Townsville
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I've got a Dell laptop that has developed an odd problem. As I type, about halfway through a sentence I look up and realize that the cursor has jumped backwards several words, and the characters I'm typing are appearing in the middle of other words earlier in the line. It's completely random, and is not associated with any particular key. The backwards leap always stays within the same line of the display, as well; it doesn't VT to a previous line. It's as if the keyboard is generating a random CR withut the LF, except that it doesn't back up all the way to the left side of the line. It more often is a few characters in from the left side.
I have another identical laptop which is thoroughly dead, but before I go to the effort of trying to swap keyboards I thought I'd ask... Is this likely to be just a keyboard problem, or is it probable that this is something more insidious?
Will Rogers never met me.
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Any chance you are (nearly) touching the touchpad/trackpad while typing? happens to me on occasion.
Staying in the same line is odd. Does it happen in multiple applications? If yes, write a little test app that logs all the keyboard [ADDED] and mouse [/ADDED] events, and match them up with your actual typing.
[ADDED] If need be, you can change the touchpad's sensitivity through the Mouse Control Panel. [/ADDED]
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles] Nil Volentibus Arduum
Please use <PRE> tags for code snippets, they preserve indentation, improve readability, and make me actually look at the code. modified on Thursday, December 16, 2010 7:28 PM
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Luc Pattyn wrote: Any chance you are (nearly) touching the touchpad/trackpad while typing
None. After I noticed this happening, I took some time to experiment, typing very slowly and carefully with just one finger.
Luc Pattyn wrote: write a little test app that logs all the keyboard [ADDED] and mouse [/ADDED] events, and match them up with your actual typing.
That's a good thought... I'll give that a try next week. 
Will Rogers never met me.
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I'm with Luc on this one. Every time I've experienced what you are describing, it's due to a stray finger touching the friggin' touch pad while typing.
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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See above. There's no chance of any accidental contact causing this. But the laptop was available - cheap - on eBay. Now I know why.
Will Rogers never met me.
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OK, well, I recall that one other time I had some weird stuff going on, was when my ham radio interfered with the laptop. Isolating the cables took care of that. But in your case, I have no idea how to check and see if something like that is going on.
On the other hand, maybe you should just leave it as is. You could have a competition with DD on Fridays and if you ever do tyupe somtging spullid wrong, you have the perfect alibi.  
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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No, nothing weird going on around me at the time. Just a boring hotel room.
I wonder what DD would be willing to pay for an alibi? I have a laptop available that would certainly do the trick.
I need no alibi, as my drunken maunderings are always perfectly intelligible, if not particularly interesting. 
Will Rogers never met me.
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Another idea: do you have anything else installed that can act as an input device? a bar code reader, a second keyboard, a gaming console, some kind of bluetooth device, ...? if so, disconnect all of them, and try again.
And finally: are you amidst strong electromagnetic fields, say in the middle of a power plant?
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Good idea, but there's nothing else connected, and the laptop is old enough to be missing all its blue teeth. Oddly enough, I wasn't in a power plant at the time, but rather in my hotel room in Phoenix. Perhaps I should have worn my tinfoil hat! 
By the way, is there a ANY_MOUSE_EVENT | ANY_KEYBOARD_EVENT I can capture, rather than writing a couple hundred separate event handlers?
Will Rogers never met me.
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No, there are no ANY_XXX_EVENTs. Just have a Form, and handle at least the following: MouseMove, MouseDown, MouseUp, KeyDown, KeyUp.
They can all call the same logging method which just needs one string parameter holding the caller's name and the coordinates or keycode.
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Form events will only help if hte wierdness happens when doing testing in the form. Global system hooks will capture input from anywhere in the OS. Even better, someone has already written an app to collect from them. 
Global System Hooks in .NET[^]
3x12=36
2x12=24
1x12=12
0x12=18
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You're right, but that is taking all the fun away.
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Roger, grab hold of a Live Linux CD and boot (not install) from that. If the problem continues then hardware fault is likely, this way you have eliminated the probability of Windows misbehaving.
modified 1-Aug-19 21:02pm.
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Here's my situation. I have an ASUS laptop that has 3 USB ports. I put my Vbox2 adapter on one directly since I use that to make the laptop essentially be the TV for my Xbox playing the Rock Band video game (I have to use a direct port since the calibration is so important for this game.) I then have one port that goes through an unpowered USB hub to run all my devices, like a powered drive, a MagicJack (i.e., telephone dongle), interface with a Walkman, etc.
I'd also like to run the portable drive through this hub as well. Now this portable drive is unpowered (i.e., it gets its power through the USB port.) However, it seems that whenever I try to plug it into the hub, the drive makes an unnerving clicking sound at a frequency of about 1 Hz, and is not recognized by the Windows 7 OS. However, if I use the remaining USB port on the laptop, there is no clicking sound, and the drive works fine.
OK, so for now, it's not a problem as I only have this one portable drive, and I can use the third USB port of the laptop. However, as I am getting close to filling up my 1 TB drive (don't you just love Torrent and Rapidshare? ), I will be buying new portable hard drive soon. And as I am now at a stage of life where I myself need to be very portable (I am away from my home, and thus do not have my usual car), I must have this new drive as a portable drive.
So, it seems that the problem is either that the portable drive needs to have its own USB port for the purpose of the USB port itself, or because it needs to have the full power of the port. I would hope that the latter is the case, and that a powered USB hub would work as it would supply the full power to any device. Does this sound accurate? What other remedies might I try? Thanks
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yes it is a power issue. I own a CD/DVD that has dual USB cables and plugs just for power's sake; plugging that into an unpowered USB hub wouldn't work either obviously. So use a direct USB port or add external power to the USB hub.
Did you read the documentation on the disk? it really should be in there.
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A USB port can only supply 500 milliamps of power to EVERYTHING plugged into it. If your USB hub is unpowered, you're exceeding the 500 milliamp limit.
Either plug the drive into a powered USB hub or plug it directly into it's own port on the laptop. IMHO, unpowered USB hubs are complete waste of time.
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I localized a slow network to a RJ11 network cable.
A new cable made several orders of magnitude difference in terms of speed.
However there was no actual failure in the cable. It worked. It was just slow.
What is the mechanism(s) that allows that to occur?
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Noise being taken in by the cable.
A kink in the cable will can crease a wire, increasing its resistance.
A bad connection to the pins in the RJ45 connector.
...
...
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when the cable got damaged, its characteristic impedance may have changed, causing transmission failures at the nominal speed, which the drivers will try and cope with by retransmitting the failing packets until they either arrive well, or a time-out occurs.
Cut the cable in halves, and bin it. Assuming all is well with a new cable, the old one isn't worth anything anymore.
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If it was really RJ11 and not RJ45, then I would guess your old cable was cat3.
CAT3 cable only rates to 10Mbps, cat4 16Mbps, and cat 5 or 6 up to gigabit speeds.
Cat3 cable is can only handle frequencies up the 16MHz while cat5 can handle 100MHz.
You would have to ask an electrical engineer for anything more than that.
Not only do the cables have those ratings, but the jacks and modular plugs do as well.
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Hi,
I understand that Win Vista 64 can use all of 4 gigs, and that Win Vista 32 cannot.
I'm waiting for a friend at MS to send me W7 Ultimate, but in the meantime upgraded my current Win32 system to 4 gigs from 2.
Can't say I notice any real difference in use/programming, even with apps like PhotoShop CS5 where you can allocate more memory usage.
Perhaps if I were using big Excel spreadsheets, or humongous highly-styled documents in Word, I might notice a difference ?
So: the question is: if I give this 2 gigs of ram to a friend who is running Win Vista 64, so he is upgraded to 4 gigs: is that going to do anything real for him ... if he's doing the same kinds of things I am.
And, curious, if, after switching over to W7, the 4 gigs vs. 2 gigs will make any real difference on the OS level.
thanks, Bill
"Many : not conversant with mathematical studies, imagine that because it [the Analytical Engine] is to give results in numerical notation, its processes must consequently be arithmetical, numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine numerical quantities as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and it fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly." Ada, Countess Lovelace, 1844
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