USB ports NOT working

[Mamacat104]

this is a Dell latitude laptop with Windows XP.. I think it is a D600 or D610.. anyway.. 2 months ago the USB ports were fine.. they now are no longer recognizing any flash drive put in them (all 4 of them acting same), an external hard drive not recognized and a nokia phone not recognized.. I can get the nokia phone to show but only for about 3 seconds and then it's gone.. the port with the drive plugged in keeps pinging like it recognizes it and then unrecognizes it.. I can't get it to recognize the drives so I can move some pics into them.. I have gone to the device manager and there are NO exclamation marks showing a problem.. I have uninstalled the drivers of them all and reinstalled them 5 times.. and still nothing.. I ran an update on the drivers and it installed the same ones back as the best.. I'm stuck now as to what to do to get at least one of these drives working..

Thanks for your help in advance...
Barbara

[SpywareDr]

Do they work in Safe mode?

If so, does using a System Restore point from before 2 months resolve the problem?

[Appzalien]

This Dell page goes through different ways to check your USB:
http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/SLN115082
For XP there is one section that suggests going into the bios to see if the USB ports have been disabled and setting defaults. If you experienced a power failure or some sort of malfunction its possible your bios got screwed up. Heck its worth a try, no? Is your date and time correct? If your internal battery goes south it can also cause issues when the date is 2002 or something. Sometimes the battery will recharge after a period of no use, other times it will need to be replaced or you keep losing the date time setting.