USB connections all down!

What the heck? My effect lights go down and then all my USB drives stopped working. everything i plug into the USB ports--mice, keyboards, and external HDs, i, etc.--isn't recognized.

Says "window detected error. try disconnecting/reconnecting the device." Funny thing is, THERE IS NOTHING CONNECTED to the computer. I reinstalled ALL drivers on the Dell Support website. After several issues with the alienware software I got the lights working but when I try to edit a scheme through Alienware Control Center it says that it cannot communicate with the device and whether I want to delete the profile???
Again, the lights are on but windows has issues.

So I go the Control panel (Win64) and check the Device Manager and even when nothing is connected there is one USB "device" that has issues. Even when I disabled that one still nothing is recognized. Also it says I have an 8 Hub? Not sure what the heck that's about.

One last thing, all the devices "charge up" so i can see that power is being transferred, just no data?

Please help! Tried System Restore and I never have even updated my USB driver. Though again, to be sure, I tried reinstalling all the drivers.

Thanks all

 

Have you tried re-installing from scratch? If installing Windows from scratch yields the same problem, then your problem is probably hardware (warranty time).

 

agreed... you might be looking at hardware failure.

 

I did a couple of searches trying to narrow down what's happening. The great thing is that I had just had my screen replaced so now I have to factor for THAT process.

It doesn't look like anything the techie did while installing the new screen could fry the USB ports but then again this just happened within a week of installation.

I also read reports of WD drives frying ports and I had also just gotten a new 1T drive. So it's either one of those two.

UPDATE: I've had to disable the two USB drivers that I recognized--for the Intel motherboard--(when they ARE enabled then it says I have several "Generic 8 Hub USB ports--which I obviously don't have and this is also suspect) because every 10 secs or so I get an error in the taskbar saying Widows found an error on USB drive and cannot use it. Again, there's nothing connected on the USB ports when I get the errors.

QUESTION: Someone said to reset CMOS on the BIOS. I am usually afraid to mess with BIOS but the only reason I'd try is because after my lights went down and I went through the process of reinstalling all the Drivers I also updated my BIOS from v2 to v4 and AFTER that my lights worked--though again ALienware software does NOT recognize whatever hardware controls the lights as when I try to edit a scheme it says so and asks me whether I want to delete the scheme.