okay, i'm inquiring about this on my father's behalf. so the other day, he unplugged his keyboard (a ps2 connection, not usb) and when he plugged it back in, the USB ports stopped working. Even the ones that are still working (2 out of 9) are not willing to recognize anything that is not currently plugged into them. if he plugs a thumb drive into any of them, the little lights come on, but no drive letter is assigned to them. he uses a wireless adaptor that plugs into a USB port, so this situation has taken him offline as well.

i told him i'd google it for him and see if i could figure anything out, but i couldnt even figure out what to google.

any ideas?

1/18/2013 7:58:06 AM

What OS?

Does a reboot make any difference? It could be a hardware failure, or just some weird driver anomaly, among other things.

1/18/2013 8:02:31 AM

its windows 7. reboot makes no difference. he did try uninstalling the usb drives and letting them reinstall, but that didnt do anything either.

1/18/2013 8:03:50 AM

i'd guess hardware failure, myself, though i don't have much to base that on

there's obviously some power flowing through a PS/2 port and so it's possible (though i can't imagine very likely) that something was damaged if he did it while the computer was powered on

*shrug*

1/18/2013 9:49:38 AM

PS/2 isn't plug and play for a reason, he shorted something out if he did that while the power was still on

1/18/2013 11:41:01 AM