Betalogue

I have mentioned problems with USB flakiness before. Some of the problems seem to have disappeared for now. I am no longer losing the USB devices connected to the ports on the back of my secondary monitor, an Apple flat-panel 17″.

But today I started my computer from my Disk Warrior CD in order to repair the startup volume. When the repair was done, I clicked on “Restart” in Disk Warrior. And waited. And waited. The computer never did restart. The animation that you get just before the screen goes black kept going on forever and ever. I ended up doing a hard reset, and I booted from the Disk Warrior CD again, in order to repair the volume one more time.

After the repair, I clicked on “Restart” again. Same thing. The computer never did restart. This time, I suspected something fishy. I unplugged my Griffin Technology USB Audio Hub. And what do you know? Right away, the computer finished shutting down and restarted.

So clearly this hub is at fault. I thought it was supposed to be a quality device, especially suitable for audio USB devices. Oh well. But what should I replace it with? What guarantee do I have that I won’t experience similar problems with another hub? And what if the problems are not with the hub itself, but with one of the devices that were plugged into it? They include my Parliant PhoneValet gizmo, a small Flash card reader, and my old Umax Astra 4000U scanner, which is usually not on. What a pain.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, January 26th, 2004 at 8:31 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.