Testing the Functionality of a USB Port w/out any ext. Hardware?
 

A long-standing client of mine has recently purchased a Digital Camera for use on her PC. The PC itself is a complete piece of crap but that's another story.

Her latest call asked for me to figure out what was wrong with her USB ports as anything plugged into it would not be recognised. At first I though it may have something to do with her using Win98 but the hardware she attempted to use has been Win98 compliant.

I go over on Monday night so I was wondering if anyone knew how to diagnose a USB port without using a loopback device (since the only one I had got stood on by an employee). Is there any software (preferably free legally, preferably) that could help me figure out if the USB port has problems?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I'll keep googling and the like in the meantime, chow!

try switching hardware that you plug into the port and see if they get recognized.

if not, just replace the port and see if detection occurs.

usb's on most pc's are very easy to replace.

I've noticed that even Win98SE has problems with USB compliant devices. I since switched over problematic machines to Win2k and problem evaporated.

Windows 98 doesn't have that good of a USB detection, so even though the camera is 98 compliant, you proabably need to install the drivers from the CD that come with the digital camera. If you had XP it would detect automatically and probably treat the camera's memory card as a flash drive.