OK

My old Windows XP computer finally died.  Well, almost anyway.  It's
currently on life support, but the plug is due to be pulled any time
now.  It's about 7 years old with only a 40 MB hard disk, a boot-up
procedure that fails more often than it succeeds and a nasty habit of
crashing at ever more frequent and unpredictable intervals.

A new PC was obviously the way to go.  No place for sentimentality here!
 The new one that I decided on came with Windows 7, which was a bit of a
worry given the newness of that operating system.

Now, one of these days I'm going to buy a new computer and it's going to
work first time right out of the box.  This wasn't that time....

The first problem was that the OS booted up and set my 19 in wide screen
monitor at 1280 x 800 resolution.  "No problem", I thought.  "Go to
Display Properties and nudge it up to the native 1440 x 900".  Bad idea.
The screen went black and stayed like that.  Hmmmm.  Reboot - no
display, so I couldn't even reset it back to the lower res.  Swapped the
widescreen for my wife's 19 in standard screen.  Well, at least that
worked. Reconnect the widescreen and the black screen returned.

Packed up the computer plus the wide screen monitor and headed off to
the computer shop.  Collective scratching of heads until a light bulb
went off over Dave's (Dave being the computer shop manager).  "Let's try
a DVI cable", he said.  It worked. High five's all 'round.

Back home, booted up with fingers crossed and (whew) up came the screen
at 1440 x 900.....

Next.  Pluged in one of my two external hard drives. "USB Device not
recognised" came the unwelcome message from the operating system. More
hmmms... Tried plugging it into each and every one of the other 5 USB
ports on the new system.  No joy. Connected the second external drive. 
Same result.

Now this was potentially serious because those two drives are where all
my photo backups are. Both drives are Western Digital but they are
different models. 

Off to the Western Digital site. "No special drivers are needed for
Windows 7" was the extremely unhelpful message.

Panic stations!

Remembering that 'Google is my Friend", headed back into cyberspace in
search of wisdom online.  3 hours of fruitless searching later, came to
the realisation that this isn't an isolated problem with Windows 7 and
it's not limited to Western Digital drives.  However, no definitive
solution was forthcoming - a few suggestions, some of which worked for
others but none of which worked for me (by this stage I had a few choice
suggestions of my own concerning the new computer....).

Finally, in desperation, pluged one of the drives into a 4-port USB hub
and.... suddenly Windows 7 could see it.  Same with the other drive.

Pluged it back into one of the other 5 USB ports and the dreaded "Device
not Recognised" message appeared again.

A bit more investigation revealed that not only would the two Western
Digital drives not work when plugged directly ito the USB ports on the
system board, the same applied for any mass storage device.  So I was
unable to read any of my thumb drives unless I plugged them into the
4-port hub.  However, the system USB ports work fine for my mouse and
printer.

Well, at least I now have a working system but there is another visit to
the computer shop in my future to try to sort out the USB issue. I can
only think that this problem is power related in some way and the built
in USB ports deliver too much current.  Does this sound feasible?


Cheers (sort of....)

Brian

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Brian Walters
Western Sydney Australia
http://members.westnet.com.au/brianwal/SL/


-- 


-- 
http://www.fastmail.fm - The way an email service should be


-- 
PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List
PDML@pdml.net
http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow 
the directions.

Reply via email to