Dead / Dying USB on a Dell

Had two machines out of 10 that refused to turn on yesterday morning when I got to the office.

One of them was mine - the newest one in the office.
Unplugged, replugged, did reset on the surge protector and it booted...
with totally dead USB. Not a single USB port worked.

Took it out to the warehouse and used the compressor to clean all the dust out of the inside and all the external ports.

USB then came back alive, acting as if it was the first time to detect all the devices using it, inc'g keyboard and mouse.

Have never had the whole USB subsystem die on me. Could it really be as simple as that or should I be looking at something else. Saw nothing on the board that looked suspicious at all.

The other Dell is still dead, not a peep out of it.

Could be the length of time it was unplugged - it takes several seconds for the charge to die down on the MB. It got sufficient time when you moved locations to reset.

As for the other Dell, do you get ANY hardware response when it's plugged in? Power on the MB? PSU fan?

2nd is actually an HP - it was dead, as in nothing, not a hint.

Laid it down and took the side panel off - now the PS and CPU fans spin - but no boot, no codes, and will not turn off by pressing the power button

Took it out and used the compressor on it to clean all the dust out - the power button will shut it down now and have error code that indicates "autosize DRAM".

Pulled the RAM, had one of the slots caked with dust inside it. Cleaned it out.. it's back up and running ... amazing.
This one had been running slow as molasses for at least a couple of months, but only saw minimal use.
It's also back to loading apps and spreadsheets like it should be considering it's age.

Still curious if anyone thinks I should look at something else related to the USB ports on the one machine, but I've rebooted several times now and it seems to be ok.

Never had to deal with dust issues like this on my own machines. Had been a heavy overclocker for so many years, I totally broke down all of my gaming rigs at least once every 4-6 months including pulling all devices and the CPU. Kept the inside of all those rigs looking like new.

On a PC you can go into Hardware Manager (get there by right clicking My Computer and selecting Properties I think) and delete all the USBs in the list. Then reboot and they will rebuild themselves. That clears up any corruption that is effecting the USB system. Caution: If you are using a USB mouse it will become unavailable during your deletion of the USBs. Be prepared to use the keyboard for cursor movements and to select buttons.

I deal with dust constantly in the schools and you beat me to the suggestion to reseat the RAM. Dust is evil.

I think your USB controller is fine now, but if you want, there's some diagnostic tools you can try out.

Ok, so the USB died while I was using the machine this morning.

First couple of reboots and it stalled out during the post. No beep codes or error codes.

Now it's booting into Windows, but have no USB at all. So I can't get into the M/Bd setup or anything else. Naturally, there are no PS/2 connections on this Dell.

Question is, does anyone know if installing a PCI USB card would work or wasted effort?

It should work. I had the same thing happen on one of my PCs. The internal USB controller (Intel) died for whatever reason. A cheap PCI USB 2.0 card with 5 connectors that I purchased at Staples on sale worked fine. As a matter of fact, it's still working.

Regards.

Got it working again after trying one of the old Dell tricks. Unplugged and then held down the power button for 30 seconds.

Booted right up and found all the USB again. newegg has cards for $10 though, so I'm going to get one to be ready for next time since that's twice this week.

Since it's done it 2x now I would go for a PCI USB card just in case. I wonder if there was a power surge at one point? I know you have it plugged into a UPS, but who knows.

Intermittent problems are the worst - usually preemptive of total failure. Get the new USB card