T42 USB ports no longer high speed

[CatSpirit]

A week or so ago the USB ports on my T42 stopped working as high speed (480 Mbps) ports. This is very noticable when I plug in my external drive - it is interminably slow now. I'm concerned that a flaky USB key drive might have damaged something, but it seems that the ports aren't totally hosed, so I'm unsure...

Could someone look under "Universal Serial Bus controllers" under Device Manager? My T42 lists one "Intel(r) 82801DB/DBM USB 2.0 Enhanced Controller" (an EHCI port), and the other three are "Intel(R) 82801DB/DBM USB Universal Host Controller" (UHCI ports). My understanding is that EHCI is for USB 2.0, and UHCI is for USB 1.1. If so, it seems like all of the ports should show as EHCI devices. I'm curious if that is what it looks like on a healthy system.

I'd rather not simply try a reinstall of the system just to see if it fixes this. Any ideas?

[behdadb]

It's an hardware problem !

I had a t40p with the very same issue and IBM changed the motherboard.

They are aware of this issue

[mdarnton]

My T41 has done this, too. There's been quite a bit of discussion on this on this board.

I haven't sent it back--I don't want to be without it. Instead, I bought a USB pc card with four USB ports (I needed a hub, anyway) so now I have six ports, four of which are high speed. I only use the inboard ones for the mouse and printer--my MP3 player, extension hard drive, etc, go to the card, which does function at high speed without any problem. It cost about as much as a hub would have, anyway, and I don't mind having the extra USB ports.