usbport.sys

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For at least a year now, possibly longer, I’ve been having a problem with my laptop; every now and then (or every five minutes, if it was in that sort of mood) it would simply freeze for no reason that I could divine.

It seemed to do it whatever I was doing as well; it could be sitting there idle, or I would be in the middle of writing a letter, or watching a video clip, or listening to iTunes. There seemed to be no common cause.

So I did what any geek would do - I re-installed Windows. Complete re-format job, recovery disks, the lot. Seemed to work at first, but that could have been because nothing was loaded. Went through loading all the software back on and at some point in the process it started to do it again. But I hadn’t been paying attention and I wasn’t sure what had made it start playing up again.

It got quite bad so I did the whole process again. This time I went more slowly - partly because I really couldn’t be arsed - and for ages it didn’t do it’s whole locking-up, freezing thing. Then I loaded SP2 and it started to do it again. So I took SP2 off - and it stopped doing it.

That’s the solution, then, I thought; leave SP2 off. Something has changed in that update that screws my machine up. And I left it off for quite a while, until such time as I needed to load a new piece of software and it told me that SP2 was required. (Whilst I can’t now remember which piece of software it was, I know that I haven’t taken it off, so also haven’t taken SP2 off again yet).

But of course, as soon as I loaded SP2 again, the locking-up problem started again. Over time, I began to realise that the problem was somehow related to the USB ports, but I had no idea how. Anytime I used the laptop without anything connected to the USB, I had no problems. Plug a device in and sometime in the next few minutes or few hours (never few days) it would freeze again. I tried using a USB 2.0 card in the PC slot, in case it was the exiting hardware; no change. I tried removing all the USB controllers, etc from Device Manager and making the machine find them again; no change. I stopped using USB devices unless absolutely necessary, and that helped - but my ADSL modem is USB so if I wanted to check mail or publish blog posts, I was stuck.

Then last week, I loaded a new piece of software (Last.fm Player) and got one of those blue screens that says there’s been a problem and Windows needs to restart, starting memory dump. Usually, those screens are gone before you can read them properly but this one froze and I was able to read it all. The offending file - according to the last line - was usbport.sys.

Now, given that I thought the problem might be related to the USB ports this was quite a piece of news. When the machine restarted, I searched for the file. I found that I had two copies; one in system32 and the other in an uninstall folder; the SP2 version was the current one and the one in the uninstall folder was the one that it replaced. Remembering my previous belief that SP2 caused the problem in the first place, I thought the best thing to do was to put the old one back.

Since I did that - over a week ago now - my machine has not frozen at all, even though I have been using it quite heavily to test it. I think my problem is finally solved!

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In the time that I’ve been having the problem, I’ve read numerous webpages, forums, blogs, etc with people having similar unexplained lock-ups. If you’re one of them, try doing what I did; the version of usbport.sys that you want is 133kb in size, is dated 29 August 2002 and is in the folder C:\Windows\$NtServicePackUninstall$. You need to copy it into C:\Windows\system32\drivers and, if your problem is the same as mine was, that should sort you out.

- - - - -

Of course, there is still the issue of when I create desktop shortcuts I get two of them - but if I delete one, the other one disappears when I refresh the screen. If anyone knows what might cause that, let me know.

Dancing The Blues Away

We’ll steal the wings off those angels
And kiss what we know goodbye

Music really does have the power to soothe the savage beast. It’s been one of those weeks, really, where nothing goes quite as it should. Couple this with the fact that I haven’t been sleeping very well again recently and it all adds up to feeling really quite down (massive headache, etc) by the time I got home from work this afternoon.

So, got myself a drink of something soft and fizzy, and sat down in front of the laptop to check email, feeds, etc. Cranked up iTunes as I quite often do and turned it up loud. By the time “Dancing The Blues Away” hit the speakers, that’s exactly what I was doing. A serious session of good rocking is just what the Wolf ordered.

Spot the cock-up…

It is expected that, when he steps down as an MP in the next few days, Tony Blair will be appointed as a peace envoy to the Middle East.

Is it only me that thinks that there’s an oxymoron going on here?

TTBD 3

[TTBD 1 and TTBD 2 give the background to this post. Check 'em out if you get a bit confused!]

Well, it’s day 25 of the June project; apart from Saturday 16 when I had a planned day-off to help celebrate a friend’s birthday, I’ve been alcohol free all month. Not a big achievement to some, perhaps, but I have to tell you that today was one of those days when I really felt like I needed a drink (machines not behaving themselves , that sort of thing, always stresses me out and I usually relax with a beer or three when I get home) but I didn’t and it feels good to have developed my willpower to the point where I don’t waver in situations like that.

So, with the end of June fast approaching, it’s time to consider the July project. As I mentioned in TTBD 1, this involves the use of a product called Konjac Fibre to help with weight loss (the ultimate aim of stopping drinking in June). I’m going to continue with the teetotalling and start taking the Konjac and see if I can shed at least some of the extra weight that I’m carrying around.

Since embarking on this project, I’ve been visiting a site called Fat Happens every now and then; it’s a sort of social networking, support site for anyone trying to lose weight. The one thing that comes across from all the stories that are on there is that weight loss is right up with giving up smoking as one of the most difficult things to achieve - and maintain the results. Many smokers backslide - some after a couple of weeks, some after several years - and many slimmers also backslide. I’ve done it myself. The only way to do it is to make a permanent change to your lifestyle; I’m hoping that this time I’ll be able to achieve that.

I’ll keep you posted.

Wonderful World of Machines

Today was another of those “machines are out to get me” days. You know, you buy a nice, shiny new multi-function device and then have to spend all day trying to get the software to load so that it will work properly.

Maybe it’s me, but if they say it will work with your operating system, shouldn’t it work with your operating system? None of the machines would even recognise the disc properly! Ended up having to use a laptop that was running a different OS to copy the contents of the disc across to the machine that needed to have the software loaded, and then run it from the hard-drive.

I hate the way that we have to rely on machines to get anything done these days. Don’t get me wrong, I love gadgets (I have to, I’m male - it’s the law) and I love tinkering with them; but that’s when I don’t have to rely on them. I can re-format my laptop anytime I want without losing anything important, so I can play about with it to my heart’s content. But I can’t re-format my work PC anytime I want because it takes up too much time and I can’t afford to risk losing any important data. So, I want my work PC to be reliable, but today has further proved to me that’s just not possible.

The PC I use is several years old and has had software added and taken off across that time, but to my mind the OS should be able to deal with that. Yet, you read all over the ‘Net that if you’re not reformatting your drive every six months or so, you’re just going to end up with a PC that grinds to a halt. Well, mine is definitely grinding.

But I’m not sure that a new PC would help. For a start, I’d have to make sure it didn’t come with Vista, as I know that several of our peripherals will not work with it (the manufacturers are not producing Vista drivers, because of the age of the machinery); then you’ve still got all the same issues with XP - if not more, because of all the security holes, etc. I know from experience with my laptop that loading all the MS updates can cause untold problems (it’s taken me about a year to identify why my laptop kept locking up, due to a file that got updated in SP2).

So, all-in-all, I’d quite like to go back to a mechanical typewriter please.