Usb Problems

[sputnick007 0]

I am having trouble with some of my playlists on USB memory sticks.

Often the PC of laptop does not find the device without rebooting, not convenient at a gig.

Has anyone found a reliable solution to this problem. Aslo I suppose I am supposed to use the "safely remove" icon to disconnect a usb device, again not convenient.

[McCardle 1]

Welcome to the forum.

 

This question probably would get more attention in the PC and DJ'ing section of the forum, where the techies hang out, but never the less.....

 

Do you buy your USB media from a reliable source?. This means the big name high street stores, or Play.com etc, as opposed to Amazon and Ebay?

 

The reason I ask, is that the memory market is now saturated with counterfeit and fake goods originating from out of China and Hongkong, and at first glance they look, and work like the originals, but with time are apt to lose or corrupt data, and reduce in capacity or just become generally faulty.

 

Names like Kingston memory products are hot at being counterfeited, so if you bought any memory stick or drive 'cheap' then there is a good chance that you may have been stung with a counterfeit.

 

My full time employer recently bought 30x 4gb usb sticks from a reasonably trustworthy source, for terminal data back up purposes, and every one of them was 'fake' - some of them were actually 1gb which had been flashed to appear as 4gb in capacity when plugged in, and others lost data or corrupted it or simply weren't found when plugged into the USB . Such is the market and the scale of the problem.

 

Personally, i'd try buying a USB stick from a known good source, and see if the problem goes away, if it does, then you know what the problem is.

 

The other thing I would advise, is to format them properly before you first use them. Sometimes they are not formatted properly straight from the pack, and its good practice to do a full format of a new USB stick before you use it.

Edited June 9, 2012 by McCardle

[fester 0]

I am having trouble with some of my playlists on USB memory sticks.

Often the PC of laptop does not find the device without rebooting, not convenient at a gig.

Has anyone found a reliable solution to this problem.

 

A few things you can try:

1) Visit your laptop manufacturers website and see if there are any updated USB drivers for your laptop

2) If you can't find any newer drivers, open up device manager, expand "Universal Serial Bus Controllers", right-click every device under the Universal Serial Bus controllers node, and then click Uninstall to remove them one at a time. Reboot your laptop and windows will re-install the latest drivers it can find. If they are older than the drivers on your manufacturers site then you should install the newer ones.

 

Aslo I suppose I am supposed to use the "safely remove" icon to disconnect a usb device, again not convenient.

 

Strictly speaking, yes. In practise you really don't need to. Removable drives like USB sticks have a file system on them just like your hard drive does. Most of these drives are small (

If you make sure that you are not writing to the memory stick when you remove it, it should be fine.

 

 

 

Just an afterthought. When you plug a device into a USB port, the laptop will install drivers to that particular port. Sometimes people have trouble if they keep using a different USB port. Try to use the same port every time.