T60p & minidock constantly dropping USB connection

Message

mmo · #1 Post by **mmo** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 4:51 am

My T60p together with my office docking station is starting to develop a very nasty "habit": It frequently shortly drops and re-establishes USB connectivity.

Normally this hits only one device (most often the keyboard, sometimes also the mouse), but occasionally also ALL USB devices go dead for a few seconds. The behaviour is similar to someone unplugging and immediately re-plugging the device(s), i.e. a device suddenly stops responding, one hears the device disconnected sound (dee-doo) and a few seconds later the device found sound (doo-dee) and then things are back to normal (except that a few typed characters got lost, or a mouse operation still hangs in mid-selection or such...). This happens often enough to start being annoying.

I suspect this is the docking station somehow in combination with the T60p. At home, where I privately bought me the large docking station, this never happens. But in the office these spurious effects happen, whether I plug the devices into the docking station ports or into the T60p directly.

Any ideas? Anyone seeing similar effects?

Michael

agarza · #2 Post by **agarza** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 11:24 am

Surely this happens because in Windows, there's an option to activate the USB power saving mode:

Go to run, type 'devmgmt.msc', then search for the USB branch, expand it, double click on each of the sub-branches and go to the last Label called "Energy Management" or something like that, and uncheck the "allow the system to shut down this device to save energy"

do that for every Root Controller, and hope the problem is gone.

mmo · #3 Post by **mmo** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 12:06 pm

Hm - interesting idea - I never thought about that!

I just checked - I am currently writing this from home, where this "effect" has never happened so far - and ALL root hubs have this option enabled, so I have to admit I have a somewhat hard time to believe, that this might be the actual reason for this (e.g. why would this option strike during normal operation while one is writing some text. Shouldn't these shut-downs only hit during idle periods?).

But nevertheless I will give that a try when I'm back in the office tomorrow and will report, if this changed anything.

Michael

JohnDrake · #4 Post by **JohnDrake** » Sun Sep 24, 2006 5:57 pm

T60's had a BIOS upgrade specifically to address some USB issues.

First, update the BIOS.

If the problem still exists, you should call 800-IBM-SERV, you may need an updated minidock

mmo · #5 Post by **mmo** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 1:39 am

Thanks - I am at the latest BIOS level (at least according to the Lenovo SW Installer).

I will be giving benottomex' suggestion a try the next couple of days and see what comes out of it.

Michael

SR · #6 Post by SR » Thu Jul 05, 2007 5:25 pm

Did you ever resolve this problem? I recently acquired a T60p with mini-dock and am experiencing the same symptoms (USB ports dropping out momentarily on occasion). Updated the BIOS earlier today but still no joy. Also frequently see BSOD on shutdown, but whether or not that's related is entirely unclear....

mmo · #7 Post by **mmo** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 3:46 pm

@SR:
No - I never resolved this. My only work-around is to plug certain devices directly into the T60p, not into the docking station (after all that's what one buys a docking station for: to have a nice paperweight, right?)