USB front ports vs Back port....

Megadeth4168

This to me almost seems like a silly question but here goes anyway...

There have been 3 times this month where I have worked on or given advice over the phone to people having problems with printers.

In ever single case they were connected their printer to the front USB ports which had sometime in the past been used to connect other smaller devices that worked just fine.

Seems like when they plugged the printer in they would get the computer to see that something was attached but couldnt really find the device...

In every case so far i had either plugged the printer into the back USB ports or had told the client to do so and then it worked just fine!

All 3 PCs so far have been very different except for having Windows XP (professional I'm pretty sure on all of them) installed.

Anyone else run into this? If so can someone tell me why in the world it is that the front ports on these computers do not see the printer?

Little bit of info... One machine is an older pentium 3. Another machine is 1 month old ordered from Dell... I think it was an optiplex gx520... Don't know about the 3rd machine that one was over the phone....

Just curious... Thanks.

blackzone

I don't think there should be any difference. It's the same motherboard, the front end and back end plugged into differenct place on your mobo. But it should identical. You can reverse the slot(or I think you can) and it won't make any difference.

Danman32

My parents' PCs had that problem. Turns out Antec's cases had bad USB boards in the front that weren't to USB 2.0 specs. I got replacement front panel USB boards and all was fine.

But then, the problem may only have been that the front panel would complain that the device was USB 2.0 capable, but the port wasn't. I wanted to blame the MB, but switching ports around followed the panel, not the port on the MB.

seuss_ssues

The problem has to do with them plugging in the printer before installing the device drivers.

Sie

I had a similar problem with one of my PC's, front USB ports dont work. Anything plugged in gets a "This device is not functioning correctly" (or the like error message)

A) It was nothing to do with the drivers
It was nothing to do with cabling to MB
C) Nothing to do with MB jumper setting
D) It overheated a as such broken a USB Drive that was plugged in

My answer?

I unplugged them from MB to ensure i didnt 'accidently' overheat anything again and just used back USB ports.

Just incase anyone wants to know its a K8-Upgrade-NF3 MB from Asrock.

jescab

well that makes sense...........