Semi-OT: PC won't start with USB-LPT plugged in

My transition to Win7 was fairly painless. I did have to do some customization (like settings and installing Classic Shell) to get it to look sensible, and I had to re-compile some of my old PowerBasic utilities. There are still a few latent annoyances left, things that will need registry tweaks.

The new Word ribbon menus need some getting used to.

File Explorer is still ghastly. Things jump around when they shouldn't. Sometimes files rearrange themselves in alpha order, sometimes they don't. Typical Microsoft chaos.

I use "Prime", but then I order something from Amazon just about every week ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Yes, but not with the LPT adapter in there because the PC won't turn on. The BIOS is ok, not booting via USB set.

But how could this happen with a low power USB device installed and it doesn't happen if I leave a half-amp USB load connected?

Still doesn't explain why it works fine when leaving an almost drained Li-Ion bicycle battery connected which immediately draws half an amp upon power-up.

It's not that I mind the work-around of a power-on delay. I am used to PCs becoming worse the more "modern" they are, after all it's usually the same with operating systems, software, cars and so on. I just wanted to see if anyone knows the reason or had that happen and figured it out.

I also got it to a somewhat workable status in a similar fashion. But I would not call that reliable. XP was way better, almost as good as NT4 which I consider the best OS Microsoft ever made.

WRT crashes Win 7 is sort of ok, only one blue screen every few months. It's just that a lot of stuff no longer works well or at all. This includes LAN stuff which should have never caused issues (and never did with any other OS).

File rights management is a chaos and Win 7 is very slow in recognizing LAN drives and such. My impression is they really messed that up. At the least they should have an option to switch that to legacy mode where everything worked.

Maybe I try to crack hub #3 open, the one where Win 7 even refused the driver install. The mfg said I can toss it.

Prime makes no sense for me, I don't order enough and I'd never use any of this music, movie or whatever "benefit". They will lose customers now for some purchases. For example bicycle stuff where one typically cannot wait when a brake rotor or something is through. Instead of Amazon I just wait for free-ship days at PricePoint. Interestingly, they just upped the number of those :-)

I just cracked it open. No electrolytic at all. There is:

One IC under a tar splat, four 0402 size ceramic caps, one 6MHz resonator. That's it.

That really smacks of the PSU in standby being brought down by a pwer hog device preventing the on/off button logic from working. Paradoxically I have had the exact opposite happen with a Toshiba laptop where after a while the keyboard and mouse stopped responding but pluging an new mouse and keyboard in would work. The annoying thing was that it could not be switched off without an external keyboard without dropping the battery out which is not ideal in a portable!

I have seen CF and sD card prevent booting too (or rather the PC try to boot off them and get stuck in some circumstances).

Best guess is a transient of some sort at exactly the wrong time.

Have Dell "improved" the software based switch on on newer machines?

Installing dual boot and putting XP on new hardware or Win7 on an older sacrificial box known to work with XP would be one way to find out.

When I copy files to a Linux server, W7 (randomly, of course) asks me all sorts of stupid questions about file attributes. Most annoying. I think there is a registry patch for that.

Otherwise, our network drives work fine. But then, I didn't have to set them up.

ITYM all older PCs did. Back when CPUs ran almost red hot

I can't see a way that Win7 can affect the on/off button on a PC at the point where the machine is nominally "off" waiting to be switched on.

The topper is when it says "You do not have permission to write" and then you try 3-4 times more and it goes through. Meshugginah.

There is weird stuff nowadays. For example, once I came into the office in the morning and Redmond had turned my PC on for an update. That was the day when I turned that stuff off.

So it is quite possible that the OS writes something into HW registers that then mucks with power.

I know but Amazon upped the free-ship from $35 to $49 so now I always wait until we run low on Italian espresso or electrolyte powder.

Maybe I pick on up next time I zip down into the valley on my road bike. There is a Best Buy.

My current work-around is to unplug before power down and re-plug in the morning.

-- Regards, Joerg

Sigh, I haven't shopped on amazon in a few weeks, so didn't know they had done this. When I find a cheap item that I want but don't need immediately I just leave it in the cart until I accumulate enough to get the free shipping. Now it will take me even longer to accumulate enough cheap items to hit the threshold.

On topic content: Surely you have a bootable DVD or flash drive, maybe a recovery disc or portable linux, that you could boot from to test the usb behavior? That way no win7 in the picture, without having to go through all the effort to install xp.

----- Regards, Carl Ijames

Same model, or are the XP ones older?

That is probably wake on LAN or similar. The thing I hate is when they default to killing all processes and do our updates now because no-one could possibly be running something overnight on a Tuesday.

I don't think so. I am fairly sure it is a PSU related quirk.

It's a standard TPC printer port. Worked with a brother/Win7 for the last 5 years. Now, networked printers are not that expensive, so I don't need it. Plus I have 2 of them, so just email me an address and I can send it to you. Just let me verify that the Java interface still works with Java 8. It's been a while and I think 5 or 6 wasn't compatible.

Cheers

Hope it helps

Cheers

They are all older, between 5 and 10 years. But I can't imagine Dell changing the way the USB is hardwired unless it was something mandated by the OS.

Or it's a "Don't wake on USB, ever, if it ain't our stuff!" :-)