All USBs crash at once, have to restart to get working again

Meowfia

Reputable
Jan 31, 2016
6
0
4,510
So i've had this problem for about a year and i've owned my computer for a year. I've troubleshooted within windows and turned off any settings that allow windows to shut down my usb devices for power saving but none of that has worked.

Basically, I will be playing a game or even not doing anything intensive on my computer and suddenly, my headphones don't make sound, and my internet doesn't work (I have a USB wifi adapter, the linksys AE2500) and then my keyboard and mouse will stop working within a minute of this happening. I've noticed this happens multiple times within let's say, an hour and i've noticed that it sometimes doesn't happen for a week, but it's happened enough to be an extreme nuisance over the past year.

Another note is that on my case, the USBs on top have never worked, along with my audio and mic port, however my restart button and power button work. The six USBs I have on the back of my case have always worked, but I am led to believe that I can only have 4 things plugged into my USBs on the back but i'm not 100% sure because i don't need more than 4 most of the time. (i have a mouse, keyboard, wifi adapter and a audio/mic to usb adapter plugged in)

specs:
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP4-TH
Power supply: corsair gs600
case: NZXT Phantom 410
Graphics card: Nvidia GTX 660
ram: I honestly can't remember but I have two 4gb sticks of DDR3
I have a 256gb SSD and a 3TB HDD if these are of importance but i doubt it.

If any other info is needed, I will provide it l, thanks
 
one tip that may help decide if it's hardware or windows, if you have a spare hard drive, connect it and dis-connect all other drives in the computer

then re-install windows, just windows and no other programs - and see if usb devices work. If they do, then windows has corrupted the usb controller files

hope that helps but at least you'll be able to narrow it down to hardware or windows

I had a similiar issue with my computer and couldn't decide if it was Mobo with a fried controller or windows

proved to be windows, and what fooled me, was that i do a clone copy of my OS drive every week, leap frogging cloning to two different SSDs - what i didn't know was that when cloning, most of the backup software looks at the target drive, and if it sees the same file with the same date, it doesn't overwrite it

so when i cloned my copies back to my OS drive, it was not overwriting the corrupt files

now when i clone, i wipe the target drive i'm cloning to before starting the clone

 

Meowfia

Reputable
Jan 31, 2016
6
0
4,510
I would try that if i had a spare hard drive or even a non-OEM version of windows, as i bought the OEM version thinking it was the normal one on sale. Forgot to mention i have Windows 7
 
i'm running win 7 as well

as long as you're using the OEM copy on the same computer, it will install - even if you borrow a ssd from a bud, or research the procedure for making a usb stick bootable, again, bare windows install, just to see if the usb ports work

prior to my incident my usb ports would start dropping connection then reconnecting ext HDDs - i'd re-install intel's 3.0 usb driver, and all would be well for 2 hours to 5 days, very unpredictable

again, this will help you determine if it's software related or mobo gone bad