USB back from the dead… and then dead again

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
December 28th, 2003 • 6:47 am

Eight days ago, I mentioned some weird problem I had been having with the USB ports on my secondary monitor. At the time, I predicted that the problem would clear up on its own accord, at some point in the near future.

I have a USB Dymo LabelWriter that I only use very occasionally, mostly for testing purposes. When the USB connection is operational, its LED turns green. Otherwise, it stays red. (It has its own power supply.)

I decided to leave the Dymo connected to one of the defective USB ports and keep checking the colour of the LED from time to time, as a way to detect when the USB ports would decide to come back from the dead.

Yesterday, I had some other weird problem with Mac OS X refusing to change screen resolutions (for a game), so I ended up restarting my machine, for the first time since the USB ports had died and I had restarted the machine several times as an attempt to revive them.

I didn’t pay any attention yesterday, but this morning when I woke the computer from sleep, the LED on the Dymo was green! So it looked as if the USB ports had come back to life. We had guests for lunch, so I didn’t test things any further. Then I came back to the computer this afternoon, and… the LED was red again.

Unless my mind is playing tricks on me or I am turning colour-blind, it looks as if the resurrection of my defective USB ports was… short-lived. I am now back to my inexplicably crippled USB environment.

I really wish I had some real troubleshooting tools I could use to better isolate the problem.


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