Fried USB Hub

It had been several uneventful days …..

Earlier this month I purchased a simple 4 port mini USB hub to compensate for the lack of ports (or overload of USB devices) on my laptop. It worked well for the past 10 days until I plugged in my scanner yesterday. The scanner, unlike the other devices plugged into the hub, is USB powered. I first had trouble installing the driver of the scanner due to the unintuitive self-extracting driver program. However, immediately after I figured out how the driver install (let the files extract and just plug the scanner in), I got the familiar warning pop-up on the tray. A power surge. Last few times I got the power surge warning were because I was using the USB power for DIY devices. This wasn’t the case. The packaging on the USB hub clearly stated that each port is provided with 500mA of power which, I believe, is that limit for USB powered devices, such as my scanner. I unplugged the scanner and hooked it into a laptop port to finish my scanner job. Then I realize the USB hub no longer works. It’s as if it’s stuck on surge mode. Whenever I plug in the hub, I get the warning and the computer doesn’t respond to the hub. I figure drawing power from the laptop port to power my scanner somehow fried the circuit and it was stuck in that state which constantly request for some amount of power beyond USB standards. For that fact, the laptop refuses to recognize the hub and so anything connected with it is also ignored.

I desperately need the hub for my external drives and printer connection, as well as other USB devices I have in plan for the future. So today, I took the hub back to the store I bought it at and complained that the hub isn’t working. I eliminated the part about plugging in the scanner to minimize the reluctance in giving me an exchange. The guy at the service department was fairly nice. He tested the hub out on the machines there and concluded that it’s probably fried. He checked the purchase date on my recipe and gave me a new one. I felt like I’ve scammed them even though technically it should be consider a defect. Or maybe that’s just an excuse for myself. I’ll remember not to plug any USB powered devices into the port from now on.

The new hub

Posted in Tech
Tagged as usb