techie help required

well, i guess the obvious thing (if you haven't already), is to download latest drivers for all your USB devices and see what happens. a slightly gib response, i know, but there you go. good luck

Try starting in 'safe mode'(by pressing 'F8' at boot and choosing it from the resulting options) to see if things work OK then, Ely. If so you will be fairly sure it is a driver problem and not a hardware fault (which I think is unlikely). Mind you, not everything works in 'Safe mode' so your USB gadgets might not function but i reckon it's worth a try. If things do work OK in 'safe mode' at least you know it's not a hardware problem and if not, you've lost nothing but 5 minutes or so. If it is a driver problem it will be just the one - but it might take a bit of finding.

Thinking about your point that any USB device seems to freeze the mouse then it would limit the number of possible device drivers to a minimum. Assuming everything worked OK before it would be worth going to 'System Properties' then 'Device Manager' and then plug something in to the USB to see if you can find any conflicts... mind you, as you will know by now - it's tricky to do things without a mouse!

Well thank God I'm not the only person to have the same problem. I recently had to buy a mouse when the internal one on my laptop went awry. Since then the computer won't recognise the scanner or the printer. I've tried un-installing and re-installing both but the computer still says that there is no scanner or printer. I did a complete restore yesterday but the problem is still there. I have a 4 port USB hub and occasionally a small window has popped up saying that I may need a high-powered one. But surely the 4 port one that I have should do what it is supposed to do? I.E. support 4 items? But----I did only get problems after the exterior mouse was installed. Maybe just maybe; the fact that there is also an internal mouse as well is overloading the system just a tad. Is there a way of disabling the internal mouse? Oh yes the mouse was also 'freezing' yesterday.

USB ports can overload, you may have a device that is drawing too much current or possibly a bad chip in the USB circuit that can't handle the total load. Try removing all devices from the USB buss, reconnect them one at a time, see if you can isolate it to a particular device. If it seems to be simply a matter of the number of devices on the buss, then go spend 20 bucks (10 pounds) on an expansion card or external USB hub that has an external power source. It's not a bug...it's a feature.

Well it's not the USB port sadly, I say sadly because it's worse; it's the hard drive that's knackered. I'm in my local library at the moment writing this. How much are hard drives anyway? My computer whiz brother says that it will be cheaper to buy a second hand computer. Bummer!