2yo Dell Desktop Flakey USB ports

Archived from groups: alt.sys.pc-clone.dell (More info?)

I have a Dell that is a factory floor PC and a bit mission critical.
Following the hot weather onset the USB port that runs our data
aquisition aplication has become flakey and disconnects while in the
middle of running our program. Device manager shows no hardware
conflicts etc in windows xp. We do use a powered hub. There is a error
message that states that the device has disconnected in the middle of
our operation however. We loaded the appliation on another PC and it
worked fine so I suspect the PC has a hardware issue. We then added a
USB add-in card and the problem persisted. Does the Dell have
hardware monitoring by utility or on the BIOS level? What would be
the probable cause of this issue. My thoughts are the following in
this order: Power supply bad, Motherboard bad, CPU bad, RAM bad. It
is out of warranty but want it fixed and know the parts are
proprietary. Please advise on the best way to proceed. Thanks Don

Archived from groups: alt.sys.pc-clone.dell (More info?)

<Snip>We then added a
> USB add-in card and the problem persisted. ........... that would show
thats its not your onboard USB ports and would confirm this if the problem
persisted in each PCI slot you tried it in. you could also try using
something like an external cd writer via the usb port to confirm this . Try
reinstalling the application as the file could have been corrupted I doubt
very much if its a PSU problem either especially if you were using a powered
hub