Re: USB ports degraded..

Thanks for all that. With your reassurance I'll go ahead and install a card..
To be honest, if that gives me proper hi-speed functionality I doubt I'll
have the resolve to investigate the existing ports further, though you give
me a lot to go on!


"Paul" wrote:

Walter M wrote:
Some time ago I damaged physically one of the USB 2 ports on the front of my
PC, and subsequently (probably as a result) find that all the other ports,
four at the back and the second one on the front panel, though still working
are now functioning in a very degraded mode and are slower in transferring
data by a factor of 10 or 20.

There's no error or warning displayed in Device Manager against the Enhanced
Host Controller, or anywhere else.

Is it likely that I've broken some hardware on the motherboard, or is there
any diagonstic that I can perform to clarify whether reinstalling some
firmware or driver might fix this?

At worst, I could presumably install a USB/Firewire expansion card to
replace the failed ports.. A couple of other questions then arise: If I do
this, will I need to delete the exisiting drivers and controllers, and so on,
to avoid conflicts, and hence abandon the existing USB ports; and if so, am I
likely to run into difficulties at any time, including reverting, if I can't
access an XP installation disk?

Many thanks for any thoughts..

[Windows XP Home, SP3]

Your cheapest alternative right now, is to install a new expansion card.
The driver installed for the card will be handled independently by
Windows. In other words, when a hardware device is added, the best
driver for the device is installed. Windows would look at the
enumeration of the new USB expansion chip, and install a separate enhanced
entry for it.

Based on the response of the new USB expansion card, you'll get a better
idea of whether your theory is correct or not - that there is a problem
with all the USB ports on the Southbridge.

When an ICH5 or ICH5R Southbridge has a latchup failure on its USB
ports, all the Southbridge USB ports fail at the same time. What
happens in that case, is wires inside the chip, connected to
the USB power source, burn out. That is just an example of a failure
where all ports can die at the same time.

The following, gives a simple walkthrough, of how they tell the difference
between USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 at the hardware level.

http://www.lvr.com/usbcenum.htm

A program like the Microsoft UVCView, can be used to get the enumeration
information from a USB device. But that doesn't tell you whether the
physical layer is damaged or has a high error rate on transmission.
It could be, that your ports are simply failing part of the
detection process for USB2 devices, and all the devices end up running
at USB 1.1 instead. While Microsoft used to host this file, it has
been removed, and now we rely on archived copies. (It might also be
part of one of their SDKs.) You'll need other information from the web,
to interpret what appears in the window.

ftp://ftp.efo.ru/pub/ftdichip/Utilities/UVCView.x86.exe
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/USB_IDs/UVCView.x86.exe

File size is 167,232 bytes.
MD5sum is 93244d84d79314898e62d21cecc4ca5e

This is a picture of what the UVCView info looks like.

http://www.die.de/blog/content/binary/usbview.png

Some information on the parameters seen in UVCView.

http://www.beyondlogic.org/usbnutshell/usb5.htm

Paul

.

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