Wednesday, August 15, 2007

To USB or to not USB... that is the question

Wow... I must be busy... its Wednesday and I haven't had a chance to do a post in a while...  I have so many things spinning in my head at the moment, that its hard to know what to focus on.
 
Work is going good... I am extremely busy however and am already making plans to add staff to my humble department here at the office.  Without going into detail about work, it appears that I have replaced a person who used to have 3 staff but that slowly dwindled to just himself and he too left.  It wasnt the reason he left, it was all just bad timing... So whilst they have recruited his replacement ( i.e. me) they have made no attempts to recruit his other staff... so, I am in a great position to propose a restructure / re-hire of certain roles.
 
Unfortunately though it will take time and I will have to put all this on the backburner until possible 2008.
 
On the home front, I managed to get Kate's iPod working and am extremely happy that I was able to perserve and solve it.  Sure it took 4 nights of me cursing and Niki calling me "obsessive" but the truth is I have never really encountered such a problem on a computer before and I refused to let it beat me.  The answer - for those who have been following my angst in the forum - is that the front USB port doesnt seem to like direct connections to USB Drives (which an iPod essentially is).  I encountered this before with my PSP and use my PSP via the Sony SanDisk port but for the iPod its the USB or nothing...
 
I didnt fix the issue, but I worked around it and connected a USB Hub to the main port and the iPod to the Hub... now works perfectly, but I have no idea why it wont work directly.  I also dont believe the USB Port is a 2.0 USB connection either... not sure why it isnt as the box is only 8 months old.
 
You can see why Niki thinks I am being obsessive...
 
If anyone has any ideas on why this workaround works (i.e. sticking a USB Hub in as an intermediary device) please let me know... all I know is that it works.
 
 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The windows usb driver has all sorts of maladies. We're in the process of discovering these the hard way at our company. Hand over part of the job (namely identification) to a hub probably fixes some of them.