Weird USB problems - bad ground?

Hardware and technical stuff
1

I was just losing my damn mind when my machine stopped recognizing my keyboard for half an hour. No problems with the Logitech receiver plugged into the USB passthrough – I could control the machine with that mouse – but the (silly) RGB backlighting on the keyboard was dark and it wouldn’t recognize any input.

3-4 reboots later, including some downtime, the keyboard is working in a different port (I swear I tried it in all of them…) and I’m functional again. But this isn’t the first issue I’ve had – my Oculus Rift and its three USB connections has never been happy with this machine – and I’m suspecting a bad ground or something is causing me these intermittent problems.

2

Recently my SteelSeries headphones stopped working. I was pissed. Then just for the hell of it I switched USB ports with my Logitech mouse. Now everything is fine. No idea about the reason though.

3

My logitech keyboard and mouse together pull too much power if I connect them to the best port for reach/wiring reasons which is the one on my monitor. The issues are intermittent. I switched them to a powered usb hub and everything has been roses ever since.

4

Yeah, I’m coming toward a voltage level conclusion here. The weird thing is I’m not powering any kind of crazy anything, but maybe this mobo in particular just doesn’t love powering much of anything over USB.

Weird that the problem showed up now, but could well be that the mobo was just over spec and in its old age is falling just under. Would explain the intermittent issues and how I seem to be able to try different ports until one of them works…for a while.

5

I gotta think that an older mobo connected to an RGB keyboard might draw a bit more power. RGB is the herpes of the computer industry.

6

Are these USB ports all directly off the motherboard, or is there an internal hub? A hub could easily have a poor connection causing the voltage to droop and fail like this, but not likely from the motherboard directly unless all the cables are bad.

Do you have another USB keyboard you could try where it fails? There may be more symptoms or troubleshooting from the OS if you get a utility like

or

There are USB logs you can enable in the event viewer if you need more crunchy details.

7

Thanks, I may putz around with those when I get a minute.