USB Woes, Static Woes
woe [woh] –noun
- grievous distress, affliction, or trouble: His woe was almost beyond description.
- an affliction: She suffered a fall, among her other woes.
- an exclamation of grief, distress, or lamentation.
Put dry weather, carpet, computers, and billions of spare electrons together, and you have a good case for static electricity. I touched a USB cable attached to my computer and drew a nice arc of static electricity. And then, all was dead. No keyboard or mouse control. No external back-up drive, no printer, no scanner, no memory card readers, no Ipod, no camera, no USB thumb-drives. All of these devices instantly quit working. After much diagnostic work, I surmised that my little shock, burned a hole in one too many semiconductor junctions.
I had five USB ports in the back of my computer and another three in the front and none would work. Unfortunately, all of these USB ports were built on-board the motherboard. Our local shopping center of Helena, MT does not host a great number of options when it comes to computer parts. Wal-Mart produced nothing, and Staples had a simple USB card with two external ports and one internal. I bought two additional four port hubs to multiply the numbers a bit. This is an unhandy situation since the three ports on the front of my computer are now worthless. I could of ordered a nice USB card with five ports for next to nothing from Newegg.com but then, I would have to wait several days to get things up and running again. Maybe I will order it anyway and move all of this makeshift stuff to my older computer that I have in my Ham Radio Shack.
Then to make matters worse, my computer only has two PCI slots with both filled. I discarded the PCI modem, since I have broadband and put the USB card in that slot.
Now, with a tangle of wires, transformers, and USB hubs, I got everything up and running again… Just not as convenient as before.
And, the moral of the story is? Discharge yourself of all static electricity before touching your computer.