How do I fix my USB problems?

1st problem:

Mouse died, bought a new one. This mouse would not work in the same usb port the old mouse did. I had to use a previously unused usb port on the other side of the laptop. The original usb port is not damaged and works just fine with a usb flash drive.

I want my mouse to work with the original usb port like it was supposed to. I suspect perhaps somehow driver info for the old mouse is still in the system preventing a clean install of the driver software on the usb port?? just guessing here that may not even be possible.

2nd problem:

I use a vantec 2.0 USB to IDE adapter. (this lets you use a regular hard drive for storage through the usb port for laptops or systems that don't have a way to install another hard drive)

Suddenly one day the PC refused to work with this adapter. It will work fine on my wife's windows XP system so I know there is nothing wrong with the adapter or hard drive. Again, the original port this was connected to still do works fine with other regular USB devices. I'd like to get this back working on my system.

I am using Windows 7 64 bit. Any help for these two problems will be greatly appreciated.

 

any errors or warnings in event viewer logs? Try this little util
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html

 

Interesting app - I was able to use it to determine what ports my devices were installed on. I'd pop in a working usb flash drive and see which number port activated.. so now I know what ports 1, 2 and 3 are.

I used the app to remove all unused devices that I no longer have connected to my system but it didn't make any difference. The USB flash drive works in all ports, where the trouble devices the mouse and USB to IDE adapter still work as I said above.

I looked through the Events Log after trying these devices in the ports after removing all un-needed devices and on trying them they did not generate event log errors.

Any other ideas?

 

Anything in Device management - such as yellow flags under keyboards or HIDs or Storage when those devices are plugged in?

 

No.. I expanded all the devices. I have no yellow flags anywhere. When I plug the mouse in the desired port, I do hear the sound as if the port is activating, but the mouse dont work.

When I plug the USB to IDE adapter into the desired port, I also hear the sound and see a text bubble that says, " Installing device drivers" then a text bubble saying, " Mass storage device detected" but this drive letter does not open the drive or show up under Computer in explorer. Any other flash drive does show up, as my F drive.

The adapter does show up in device manager under Universal serial Bus Controllers as a Mass Storage Device with no flags when I try to use it, even though it is not really working in the desired usb port.

I found out when the mouse is in a working port, it shows up as an "HID compliant device" under "Mice and other pointing devices" When I plug it into the desired port, it does not show up as an HID compliant device.

 

I fixed them both!! Yay!! The Nightmare is over!

Here's what I did. To get the mouse working I had to uninstall every entry under Universal Serial Bus Controllers and let windows boot up with the mouse plugged into the desired port.

This would not work for the adapter. I took another look at the adapter in the above program USBDeview and noticed where the UBS flash drive had an assigned drive letter, the USB adatper did not. I searched on how to assign this a drive letter which led me to open Disk Management. Disk Management did see the drive the adapter is hooked up to but as Disk 1. It said this disk was working but it was "offline". It gave me an error saying this device did not have a drive letter because it was colliding with another drive. I had the option to try to restart the device and make it "Online" I choose this option and suddenly, the drive got it's drive letter back. Now I can use all drives and USB flash drives normally with their own letters getting assigned to them properly.

Happy day! I can continue my world conquest now Thank you folks for your answers. Your info did help because it helped me rule out what worked and didn't work to come to a proper conclusion.