Vista OS does not recognize USB plug ins

[Hildegard]

I hope someone can help me.

I have a brand new HP laptop with running Vista Home Premium. USB devices I
regularly use is my digital camera, my iPod, a bluetooth USB stick, my
printer and my wireless mobile internet device. Every time I plug one of
these in, I have to pray that it will be recognised. If it is a good day, and
it is recognized, it does not show up in My Computer or in Windows Explorer
and I cannot unplug it safely. With some of the devices, every time I plug it
in, I get a pop-up which says it is updating the driver software, but it does
not seem to make any difference.

Does anyone have any advice?

All of these devices works perfectly on PCs with XP OS.

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

Your Power Management settings in the USB Root hubs is probably turning off
the hub and giving your device recognition problems. Additionally, you might
have some devices set to use 'write caching' and adding a problem for the
device for 'Safely remove hardware." Take a look at devmgmt.msc (device
manager) to use the Properties of your drives, and the Hubs, to see what is
going on there on Power Management, and Write Caching

--
Was this helpful? Then click the Ratings button. Voting helps the web
interface.
http://www.microsoft.com/wn3/locales/help/help_en-us.htm#RateAPostAsAnswer
Mark L. Ferguson
..

 

[John Barnes]

If it is recognised and not showing up in Computer (My is gone ) you
need to go into Drive Management and assign a non conflicting drive letter
for drives. Plug the sticks into the computer 1 at a time and assign a
letter and name to each. You should connect your other USB items into the
same connector each time. You can run the printer driver program on each
but if I remember, you end up setting up separate printers for each.

 

[Rich T]

This is a big and well known problem in vista. I have spent hours if not
days following advice on here, googling, installing BIOS upgrades, patches
and everything else I can possibly find to fix the problem and still have
the same issues. Sometimes a USB accessory is recognised, sometimes not.
Then if you do get it to work, it will eventually fail at some random
moment! Vista seems to have unresolvable USB issues of a lot of computers.

 

[John Barnes]

If it is only with 'a lot of computers' then it is not a Vista problem, but
either a motherboard problem or user problem. I personally have 15 +4 (15
onboard and 4 on a hub) USB ports on the computer and often have 14-15
devices connected at a time. I have 11 devices connected full time and
often have 3-4 connected temporarily while loading data or songs or loading
or unloading pictures from a camera or two. I have no problems with any of
them being recognized properly. I do have one external USB case, an old
one, that will not recognise on the computer on USB, is recognised by
Firewire, but even in Firewire the data on it are inaccessible. The BIOS
for that case is not compatible with Vista, but works fine on XP. That is
the situation for a number of cases that have a built in BIOS.