Xp re-format dilema

[legger]

Do i or dont i, my Dell laptop is having problems with usb and removable media, it doesn't recognise anything usb, my usb printer works my usb card reader works, but when i try and install usb drivers for my new digital casio camera is says that my system is inadequate to run usb, also i bought a 1 gig usb memory stick which is supposed to be plug and play, it doesn't recognise it.

My printer and card reader were installed when i first bought my laptop, i have now aquired a 2720 and cant load the drivers for the usb to recognise it.

Action taken so far, i have run system diagnostics in the boot menue which took about two hours and found nothing, i have have upgraded my Bios from the Dell support website, tried to reload drivers manually for each usb prehiferal with no luck, i have also run chkdsk which found nothing, i removed all usb devices in Device manager and rebooted my computer thinking it would search and reinstall all files required to run usb, no joy
when i rebooted there were no drivers at all in device manager for my usb, all there were was yellow aspiration marks, i had to use system restore to get them back.


I think the problem is a corrupted or missing dll file, but that is where my computer knowledge stops.

I have three years of work and crap on mi laptop, aswell as all the picis and illegal software, i desperately dont want to re-formatt but it is looking very mush likely i will have to, any ideas, thanks in advance.

Andy

 

[simonm]

Legger

Try an XP Repair before re-formatting.
Assuming you have a bootable XP CDR just proceed like you are doing a fresh install but choose the repair option. There's any amount of explicit how to's littering the web if your nervous.

 

[Fanum]

Have you installed SP2???

It makes a massive difference to USB support......if you haven't got it, go to the windows update site and get it and it'll almost certainly solove the problem

 

[Nostromo]

I had problems with my son's new Sony Walkman.
After hours of messing about I found that the USB ports on the front of my desktop ( where I had plugged it in) seem to be USB 1.1 and the ones on the back are USB 2.0 which is up to 40 times faster.
Check that the new items are not USB 2.0 only as a three year old laptop may have USB 1.1 ports.