Very very slow USB drive connectivity, what should i do?

[milstein]

Hi,

I have an X61 tablet, (7767-96U). After some installing of softwares, my external USB drives became unusably sluggish!
I checked the BIOS, and found nothing to configure for the USB except for [enable] vs [disable]
And then I Uninstalled all the USB drivers in device manager. And reboot Vista to let Vista to reinstall the possibly "corrupted" drives again.

It worked for a while: right after booting up and logging in Vista, the USB flash drive fires up promptly when it was plugged in, and copying files (if just 12mb) was almost instant.
However, without having the USB flash drive even unplugged, the browsing and response of the same USB drive became very sluggish right after a few minutes of having it plugged in, say ~5-10minutes.
Now, copying a file of size ~30Mb will takes 15 minutes, and the response of the drive is very very very very VERY VERY SLOW
(FYI, I've already disable ReadyBoost to check the flash drive when it is plugged in, I remember that the same sluggish behaviour happens to my USB SATA drive\iPod too)

Do I need to list out the software that I have on my Vista Tablet X61t? But my XP T60 is working perfectly alright with similar software packages installed on it...!

I have used tasklist to list out the processes difference when the USB flash/non-flash drive is plugged in or not plugged in, but have no really big discovery:
When the USB drive is plugged in:
Potentially 1 less process
- "modsync.exe" (Sync Center of Vista, think that's irrelevant)
Potentially 2 more processes
- "wudfhost.exe" (MS essential for USB...)
- "dllhost.exe" (MS dll managing executables...)

Couldn't find the difference when I do a "tasklist /svc"...

I want to use System Update version 3 to help me download and reinstall all hardware drivers specific to my Thinkpad. However, System Update list no option to reinstall already installed packages (while these Lenovo drivers may have been overwritten by some of other software afterwards)
I have no way to reinstall drivers through system updates, and have no clue on which specific hardware drivers should I tackle for this external USB problem

When I right click a file on a USB drive, it takes 3 minutes to wait for the context menu to pop up, and after I press delete, it takes 30+ seconds to response... that's VERY frustrating...

Please help!

[milstein]

I found out that the unworkably slow connectivity happens to my USB flash drives only, but not to my other USB hard drive...

[truk]

I've found that many programs trying to sync music, pictures, or other files can kill the speed of a flash drive. Look for any hidden files on your drive that might indicate media player or a picture management software thinks it's a camera or MP3 player. Do you have any software that you use to autorun such devices, as that would be a good place to start looking.

[milstein]

truk, thanks for your comments
I've tried reinstalling from scratch on this X61 tablet --- and I've installed Vista Ultimate SP1 DVD educational version, and then Lenovo system updates 3.14. The USB flash drive was performing lightning fast in the fresh install.

But then after I've installed some Thinkpad drivers/packages from the system updates (just the necessary packages for my hardwares), alongside with some other Windows updates and patches --- then the USB flash drive went bad again!!!

I'm not sure, I think something fundamental went wrong - either Lenovo or Microsoft, or some company provider the drivers / windows services packages.

[truk]

It could be lenovo modified USB drivers. You could try uninstalling and updating them from microsoft. Did you notice if any of them said they had anything to do with USB?

[milstein]

There is something called "Registry patch for Windows Vista USB S3 PM Enablement"
I tried uninstalling some of these suspicious packages and restarted... but that could not fix the problem and found nothing specific...