On Startup, PC hangs, USB ports lose power

Hello there,

I have a 4 year old pc (Acer Aspire T300 MHD11471 Intel Pentium 4 2.60GHz, 512 MB RAM, running on Windows XP SP2) and ever since I bought a 5.1 Sound Card (around 6 months ago for the new 5.1 surround speakers I bought) this is what happens everytime I boot up:

Machine starts up, the Acer screen quickly flashes up, then Windows says it is starting up. Then, the screen goes blank (very, very dull glow - not completely black) and it sits there for probably 3-4 minutes. During this time the USB ports lose power (mouse, keyboard and external HD). After the 3-4 minutes it then goes to the Windows logon screen. The mouse and keyboard are now working fine but the external HDD (Western Digital Elements 500gig) is always disconnected. In order for it to be connected again I have to take the USB connection out of the back of it and reconnect it. That works and when I logon all is fine. If I don't take the plug out and put back in the external HD will be disconnected which wipes my music library everytime and also just causes a general annoyance.

I had my external HD before the sound card and this never used to happen. Does this suggest some sort of hardware / driver problem? There is no issue in my device manager alluding to something not being right. The sound card works fine (all 6 speakers work fine).

I look forward to someones reply.

Many thanks in advance.

 

Hi Steve,

It still hangs exactly the same. I will check again just now but I am almost certain it will do the same thing.

I will post here in either 5 minutes or 9 minutes (depending on whether it hangs or not) to confirm.

Cheers.

 

Yes, just confirmed that it makes no difference if the external HDD is plugged in or not - it still hangs for the same amount of time.

 

Hi Waverly73, How big is your PSU? you may not have enough power (Wattage) in your PSU to run all the things you have hooked up. Neil.

 

Hi there. I haven't added anything else that plugs into USB (not for at least a couple of years anyway). I'm not on a network either - its a standalone machine. I did take out the internal modem when I installed the sound card - would that do anything?

If I unplug all devices (external HDD, mouse, keyboard) and do as above how will it work seeing there will be no input devices? Will it be just a matter of when I reboot to plug them back in once windows re-detect the ports?


In response to 'retired learner' I am not actually sure how much power the PSU has. Whats the best way to check that? The thing that seems weird is this never used to be a problem before I installed my new sound card. I bought my external HDD a couple of months before the sound card and it used to power up and stay on without an issue so that would eliminate the PSU being underpowered wouldn't it?

Thanks for the replies guys.

 

The PSU will have a label/sticker attached with the specs of the PSU shown. This may only be visible from inside the case and in some you have to remove the PSU to see it. Some makers have like a graph sheet with voltages and watts output shown. I would think from what you have working in your PC that you would need a PSU with at least 400W - 500W output. Your new Sound card may be sucking a few extra Watts. Neil.

 

Hi again,

Would this explain the 3 - 4 minute hang as well as the loss of power? Could it be that they are not related or would one be because of the other?

I will have a look at the PSU tonight to see if I can find anything. Either way, if it is the PSU not having enough power what solution is there to this issue?

Thanks.

 

Hi W73, I have up graded my PSU from an original 300W to a 450W as I have installed more cooling fans and more RAM and better Graphics card than I originally had when I first built the PC. It's prudent to have a little more grunt just in case it's needed as some programs (games for one) take quite a bit of juice to run efficiently. When starting the PC you will quite often hear the fans and the HDD change pitch which indicates to me that there is a demand for Volts. When all is up and running properly, you don't notice the same noise changes while operating. Neil.