Power Surge On Hub Port

[keestha]

On one of my PC's, which is running on Win XP, since a few days continuously a balloon appears at the bottom of the screen which says " a USB device has exceeded the power limits of its HUB port. For assistance in solving this problem, click this message". When I do so, I get a list of the USB ports, and a message that says: "location of the device is shown in bold type". Indeed two of the USB ports have a question mark in front of them, and a text saying "unknown USB device", one of them in bold letter type. The other USB ports symply have a text saying "unused port".

Only the printer, which functions normally, is connected via a USB port, and the message also appears when the printer has been unplugged.

I went into device manager, which says all the USB ports are functioning properly, and also the Add Hardware option in the Control Panel cannot find any unknown hardware.

When I right click on the message, it disappears, but it keeps coming back.

Using the restore option to go back one week, before the problem occurred, also didn't help.

Edited October 1, 2009 by keestha

[PMK]

My best guess is a hardware problem with the USB chip on MB. Not much you can do except change the MB if that is what it is.

What happens if you disconnect all the USB devices? Not just power off - disconnect from the computer. Does the error go (and stay) away?

How old is the computer?

On one of my PC's, which is running on Win XP, since a few days continuously a balloon appears at the bottom of the screen which says " a USB device has exceeded the power limits of its HUB port. For assistance in solving this problem, click this message". When I do so, I get a list of the USB ports, and a message that says: "location of the device is shown in bold type". Indeed two of the USB ports have a question mark in front of them, and a text saying "unknown USB device", one of them in bold letter type. The other USB ports symply have a text saying "unused port".

Only the printer, which functions normally, is connected via a USB port, and the message also appears when the printer has been unplugged.

I went into device manager, which says all the USB ports are functioning properly, and also the Add Hardware option in the Control Panel cannot find any unknown hardware.

When I right click on the message, it disappears, but it keeps coming back.

Using the restore option to go back one week, before the problem occurred, also didn't help.

[keestha]

PMK,

As said, the problem also occurred if there were no devices connected to any USB port.

Meanwhile I googled up a solution, or rather managed to stop the irritating message from appearing. Still think it is not a good sign, but it works like this:

1) right click my computer

2) click properties

3) click hardware

4) click device manager

5) right click USB universal host controller

6) click properties

7) click advanced

8) tick box saying don't tell me about USB errors.