How to Fix 'USB Device is Not Recognized' Issue in Windows 8
What Do I Do if My USB Device is Not Recognized by Windows 8?
In some rare cases, Windows 8 can fail to detect certain USB devices when connected. The most possible reason for this issue can be conflicts between other USB devices that users might have connected to the computer. In order to resolve this issue, users should try removing other connected USB devices, restarting the computer, and then reconnecting only the target USB device to the computer, without connecting the other devices at all.
If the above method doesn't resolve the problem, the issue might be old or incorrect USB drivers. Although drivers for almost all types of USB ports are present in Windows 8 driver database, there might still be some ports that the operating system fails to detect. When this is the case, administrators are recommended to update old driver with the latest version of USB driver to resolve the issue.
In order to make things easier for the administrators, Windows 8 automatically searches for and downloads the latest USB drivers from the Internet. However the process of driver search and download must be initiated by the administrator manually.
Like other driver and software update processes, the update process of USB drive also requires elevated privileges. This means that in order to update the USB driver, administrator account must be used to log on to Windows 8 computer.
How to Update USB Drivers
In order to update USB drivers in Windows 8, simply follow the below steps:
- Log on to Windows 8 computer with the administrator account.
- Make sure that the computer is connected with an active Internet connection.
- Click Desktop tile from the Start screen to go to the desktop window.
- Once on the desktop screen, hover mouse to the bottom right corner of the window.
- From the displayed options, click Settings.
- On the Settings pane, click Control Panel.
- On the opened Control Panel window, click Hardware and Sound.
- On Hardware and Sound window, click Device Manager under Devices and Printers category from the right pane.
- On Device Manager window, expand the Universal Serial Bus controllers category.
- Once expanded, right-click the USB controller that is to be updated.
- From the context menu that appears, click Update Driver Software to update the driver of the selected USB controller.
- On the displayed box, click Search automatically for updated driver software to make the Windows to search for the updated driver from the Internet.
- Wait till the selected driver gets updated from the Internet and on the next page, click Close.
- Close Device Manager window, when done.
For a detailed video walkthrough, check out the Tom's Hardware Tutorial Video above.
The above content was adapted from our Tom's Hardware Tutorials Forum.
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In my case it's exactly the other way around; Windows always worked better on my computers than Linux ever did.
Although I never had to install any drivers in Linux either, I've never had to do it in Windows 7 or 8, since the OS does it in my stead automatically and fairly reliably. I don't even have to install graphics driver, though I do it anyways out of habit.
I can't speak for banmaster, but I've tried a couple of Linux distros, none of which survived longer than 3 months on any of my computers.
In comparison, I've had experience with installing Windows XP, 7, and 8.
Apart from Windows XP, which refuses to install on hard drives that are too large, I never had any trouble whatsoever. In case of XP, fixing the issue was easy: create a partition that's not too large (make it 100GB to be safe), install XP on it, then expand the partition to fill the drive. That, or install a newer version of Windows.
I've long stopped dealing with dual-boot systems and started working with VMs instead (makes installing Linux distros that much less frustrating).
Surprise, surprise; the Linux distros are always the first to stop working (and not in the "not-responding" kind of way; more like the "not-booting-anymore-at-all" kind of way), even on a VM, whereas my Windows VMs are still alive and kicking.
Maybe I'm just TDTL (too dumb to Linux), but then again, so is 90% of the world.