Yesterday I plugged in some speakers into my computer through the green headphone/speaker jack and a USB port. After a few seconds, the light on the speakers flashed on for a split second and all my USB ports had stopped working at that instant. At first, I didn't know what was wrong, but through some online troubleshooting, I did the following:
-Restarted the computer
-Shut down the computer and removed the power cord
-Used the "Hardware and Sound" troubleshooter
-Uninstalled all USB drivers from Device Manager and restarted
-Uninstalled all USB drivers from Device Manager, shut down, and removed power cord
-Reinstalled my motherboard's default drivers from the CD (I built my computer)
After I had tried these steps and the USB ports were still not working, I tried something different. I had a USB MIDI cord hooked up to my MIDI keyboard and then plugged it into a USB port.
To my surprise, the USB plug-in sound played and the computer was picking up MIDI signals just fine in my audio workstation. I was confused by this so I tried plugging them into all of the other USB ports and it worked in all of them.
I made the conclusion that my USB ports weren't broken or fried from this and after doing another driver uninstall, I got another confusing sign.
With all of my USB devices plugged in, I uninstalled all USB drivers for a second time and restarted. Upon restarting I got a notification in the taskbar saying "Installing device driver software..." and then it would say it failed.
Also to keep in mind is that I was connected to the internet just fine so if Windows Update or any troubleshooter needed to search for drivers online it could have perfectly done so, but it didn't.
I confirmed this later when I re-plugged a USB mouse, which I confirmed to be working on other computers (where it was also able to download drivers promptly), and it gave me the taskbar notification "Windows cannot recognize this device, it has malfunctioned." or something along those lines.
Upon clicking on this notification, I receive a window that looked like:
Unused Port
Unused Port
Unknown Device
This unknown device is also showing in my Device Manager, where I also had no results with using "Scan for hardware changes."
After this, I clicked on the unknown device in the Device Manager and I went to the Driver tab. I clicked update driver as a last resort to see if doing a manual update would get this apparent driver issue resolved. It searched for drivers and said the most recent driver was already installed. I was skeptical, because the driver date was from 2006.
All this considered, I have no idea what the problem could be. All Windows tells me is that it doesn't recognize my USB devices and that it has malfunctioned, but nothing seems to be wrong with the device or the USB port itself because my MIDI keyboard was able to work fine. I think it's a driver related issue, but I'm not apt to work on it using MouseKeys.
Hopefully there is a solution out there, thanks in advance for any help.
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usb ports stopped working plugging speakers troubleshooting working