Alienware 14, 17, 18 - USB 2.0 & 3.0 devices not working

Here is an article that we just created about the issue.

LINK

 

Thanks for this! Just used it... good info.

 

No problem Mr. Fox!

 

Thanks, I dont have still any problem, but why do I take the risk?

 

Cheers, noted

 

Unfortunately this did not work for me. Since I've had this system (less than a week) all 4 ports have degraded from occasionally working with my USB 3.0 sticks to never (they do technically work but only as USB 2.0). I've reinstalled support using the latest Intel driver (v2.5.0.19) multiple times but it's made no difference. Incredibly frustrating, is anyone else seeing this?

 

All USB flash drives are not created equal. Test them on another system with USB 3.0 to see if the read/write speeds are any different. I have found that many USB 3.0 flash drives don't run much faster than USB 2.0 no matter what system's USB 3.0 ports they are connected to.

 

Ya, granted my USB 3.0 sticks are the cheapo's but the great irony here is why am I going to spend 100$ on a top quality USB 3.0 key now when there's every reason to suspect it'll just run at 2.0 most of the time on this box. Yesterday to make SURE there are no software issues I blew away everything and did a clean Win7 install...same issue with all 4 ports. I can tell with ATTO what these sticks are capable of on the very rare occasions that they DO negotiate at 3.0 and it's a BIG leap over 2.0 so I know they aren't just slow, I can only presume at this point that it's the hardware in this AW box as I've now tried 3 different sticks:

32GB Silicon Power Blaze B20
16GB SanDisk Extreme SDCZ80-016G-X46
32GB Transcend JetFlash 760

I sure hope I'm not the only one experiencing this, would like to know I at least have company in this dilemma.

 

This worked for me. Thanks!

 

Two things:

1.
The guide says

"
For Windows 8, type "Control Panel" on the Modern UI Start

· Open "Programs and Features", Uninstall USB 3.0 driver
"
but is there not something missing? I presume that from within programs and features I then choose "Add or remove programs" and uninstall USB 3.0 driver (no such driver installed already by the way on an out of the box Win 8 M18x)

2.
When I follow that link to Intel and try to install I get error "This computer does not meet the minimum requirements for installing the software". Is this not for the newly released Alienwares?


Edit:
found this on intels site
Windows 8* has a native in-box USB 3.0 driver. Intel is not releasing a specific Intel® USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller Driver for Windows 8.

 

The guide misses a small step:

1. Open the Control Panel
2. Click "Programs"
3. Click "Programs and Features"
4. Uninstall the "Intel® USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller Driver"
5. Restart
6. Install the latest "Intel® USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller Driver"
7. Restart

Done. :thumbsup:

Edit: Oh, never mind, you're sing Windows 8.

 

Yeah but thanks for your reply J.Dre all the same. Appreciated

 

Link is broken?

 

It may be just for a while, it still shows on the DELL search. I'll check what's happening.

 

Article not found. Any help pls?

Does this fix solve the issue regarding USB devices being detected/not detected every split second?
Sometimes the USB will not detect my External HD, then upon a few wiggling of the USB, it will be detected.
It disconnects at the slightest touch.


Also, I checked the Programs and Features but I do not see any INTEL USB installed.

 

You should see this:

 

I thoroughly checked my Programs and Features and I really do not see any INTEL USB.

Here's a screenshot of mine:

 

Then I suppose you need to download and install the driver.

 

I did try.
However I am using Windows 8, and the driver is available only for Windows 7.

When I try to install, it shows this error:


This is the download link by the way: Driver Details | Dell US

 

I'm getting the same issue as you regarding the USB devices being detected/not detected every split second.
Though the program does show up on programs list.
Already tried uninstalling and reinstalling it, but did not work.

 

At the ridiculous price I paid for mine, the last thing I'd expect to see are issues with something as standard as USB 3.0. I guess I'll just have to be satisfied that I at least get USB 2.0 negotiation and cross USB 3.0 out of my future expansion ideas. New platform refreshes always have growing pains so who knows, down the road an updated chipset driver and/or eXtensible host controller driver might help.

 

For the hell of it I bought some USB 3.0 rated extension cables from Monoprice, not expecting much. Surprisingly, after some initial testing this has truly helped as I'm no longer getting the 'you could go faster' warning and the sticks are benching at higher speeds. This is definitely surprising considering just plugging the sticks directly into the ports was still causing issues. Go figure.

 

I guess im the only person with the issue of connecting/disconnecting every second (HDD, Usb storage). Surprisingly , usb mouse works just fine.

 

That's bizare, some sort of slight mismatch on the mating of the pins/pads?

 

Has anyone found a solution for this yet?
I am sometimes having this problem, sometimes not.

Windows 8.
Upon further research, there are no eXtensible drivers for Win8.

 

jourdy, not sure it will completely resolve what you are experiencing, but try disabling power management features on all USB hubs, network adapters and Bluetooth devices in Device Manager. This has been an issue for me in past versions of Windows, but I find it to be an especially icky deal with Windows 8 putting devices to sleep to save power. It's way too aggressive at trying to save power. Also check your Windows power profile to make sure that's not cutting any corners to enhance battery life.

I find my mice, Bluetooth devices and sometimes even WiFi randomly stops working when running Windows 8 on battery. Unchecking the boxes giving Windows permission to do that cures that problem for me.

 

Well, all of my USB ports stopped working last night. Tried uninstalling the driver and reinstalling, but it didn't help. So I tried an entirely new install of Windows and reinstalled the driver, and still it's a no go.

EDIT: Okay, so I uninstall the 3.0 driver, and all of a sudden all of my USB ports work, until I restart Windows when nothing works again. Tried installing the driver off the resource disc, the Dell site and the Intel site and get the same result with all of them.

 

The Haswell chipset still has some kinks that need to be worked out and USB 3.0 problems affect most systems that use the new chipset... one of the hazards of early adoption, and not a surprising problem to find on a platform that places inordinate emphasis on low power utilization.

If you haven't already done so, try disabling the USB hub power management features in Device Manager. The controller may be entering a power state that is so low that it stops working and can't be detected. You may find some success in preventing this going forward by preventing the USB controller from ever being able to enter into a low power state. Check your Windows power profiles also and disable anything that resembles sleep or power savings.

Hope this helps. This can be very annoying. It happened to me once with the 17 and a couple of times with the 18 and after these tweaks I haven't experienced it again. With 18 it had been instantaneous and the moment the AC adapter was disconnected all of the USB ports turned off, mouse stopped working, etc.

 

What are the chances that the usb3.0 issue with the chipset gets fixed?

 

Is this happening with any other laptop manufacturer and is it an Intel chipset problem?

 

The USB 3.0 bug affects all Haswell systems. They (Intel) intend to fix it.

Intel confirms USB bug in 'Haswell' chipset

 

Thank you, Mr. Fox.
Will be trying this. Not sure if it will work since I already always use High Performance mode.

The weird thing is, sometimes it will work normally. Then sometimes the usb will just disconnect/connect every split second.
This happened when using Logitech G430 headphones, External HD USB 3, and sometimes even mobile phones.

 

It reads to me like this is a hardware problem and I don't see how existing systems with the old steppings are fixable outside of replacing the mainboard. Perhaps I'm mistaken..

 

If it does require hardware replacement, then maybe Intel will do a mass recall like they did with Sandy Bridge. We will have to wait and find out. If history holds true, they'll make it right. It was the SATA ports last time.

Since the new machines have no USB 2.0 and/or eSATA port available, it is something we need to keep an eye on to be sure it gets addressed.

 

Solved my problem. Went into the device manager, and under "Other Devices" my USB controller was listed as unknown and with no driver installed after I installed the drivers. Right click and select update drivers, then search the web and it will install the controller driver and all is good.

 

So is this bug fixed now since the date says July?

 

The motherboards our recent 14/17/18 were built with were manufactured well before mid July. I suspect that it's going to be quite a while before we see new revisions become available for new builds not to mention whether or not Dellienware addresses existing systems with the affected southbridge steppings.

 

There is no reason to believe Alienware will not address it. They always have in the past. They did with Sandy Bridge, and they did with the NVIDIA defect several years ago. They even took care of hinge defects on out-of-warranty Alienware laptops when they probably did not have to do that. Dell/Alienware typically always does the right thing in matters such as this. I have owned other brands where they refused to do anything because "it wasn't their fault" and they washed their hands of responsibility.

 

Oh they most certainly were responsible for the M11x hinge defect, and yes, they finally did the right thing. Poor design and/or material defect. I was intimately involved with making sure that was a front page issue here for them.

I wasn't around for the Sandy Bridge issue, but it's good that Dell made good on that. Certainly Intel had to eat some or all of the cost of doing that.

 

Yep, so I just had this happen to me the other day, great. I had a USB 3.0 WD My Passport 1TB connected for many hours, eventually out of the blue it disconnected and reconnected many times in a row and Windows threw up window after window saying I needed to FORMAT THE DRIVE, nice eh? Anyway I was able to just reseat the cable and the drive was once again online but ya, this is very annoying and the prospect of needing my mobo replaced at some point in the future makes me feel VERY annoyed.

 

Well, let's wait and see. Intel may find a way to address it without a hardware revision. Early adoption has its perks and its pitfalls.

I have two of those... a 750GB WD MyPassport and a 1TB WD MyPassport. They're kind of buggy drives and the WD Smart[mal]Ware firmware that you cannot eliminate is lousy to put it as nicely as I can.

I cannot say that I regret buying them because one was almost free and the other was purchased for 60% off. Had I paid normal prices for them they both would have been returned for a refund.

 

Damn I totally remember that now, still have my old Passport 320 that had that insane VCD partition where you had to download a malw....er firmware update just to disable the original malw....er 'useful utility partition' which only hid it, that 600+ MB was still DOA. Hell I just checked and sure as sunshine to this DAY my 320 is out 669MB. Time to take some drastic measures and fix that once and for all.

 

That trick doesn't work on my WD Passport USB HDD's for some reason. I tried it some time ago and no luck. I also could not kill the VCD partition in Linux. I have used both methods to destroy VCD partitions on flash memory. I think maybe the Smart[mal]Ware VCD might be on a read-only memory chip or something similar.

 

In the end it worked for me but not very smoothly, that VCD did NOT want to go away. I used that HP utility on the drive, which blew away the drive including the VCD but at that point the utility crapped out and couldn't actually format the drive, then errors in Windows drive manager about the drive being read only and formatting from Windows was taking hours etc and never finished, no luck with gparted etc. Ultimately the sequence that worked was the HP utility to kill the partitions then straight to MiniTool Partition Wizard which was able to partition and format the entire space and now Windows no longer sees the 669MB partition and the formatted space reflects the difference. So if you want that crap gone (and I definitely did) it does work but it's not graceful.

 

Well, I've got a bunch of stuff on them now. So, it would be a lot of time copying files somewhere else temporarily, then back to the USB drives. I may try again later on. I don't know why that did not work before. I tried several times without success. I could never get them deleted following those instructions. The VCD partitions remained intact and untouchable even when the rest of the drive partitions were nuked.

I think next time I need an external USB drive I will skip the cheesy consumer USB storage garbage and just get enclosures with normal drives like I always have in the past. Then I won't have any junk like that SmartWare to contend with. Plus, the drives can be used as permanent internal storage, whereas the WD MyPassport use a proprietary interface without a standard SATA connection. (I disassembled them to have a look and it was disappointing to see how the insides were made.)

 

I like my corsair survivor 32GB stick, it has served me very well.

 

any update on this issue? Even after turning off on device manager. The usb power of on battery still happen

 

Is this the same problem ish that we had with the previous generation ? There were lots of users that had problems with USB 3.0 that never really got sorted out.....I just make due with my drive working 100% of the time at usb 2.0....it really does not bother me that much.

 

any solution yet? my alienware 17 was shipped on 28/06/2013. Was having the usb port turn off randomly while on battery and only resume after i plug in.

By the way i'm using windows 8.

Tried turning off all power management saving feature under device manager and under windows power profile settings.
( still usb randomly turn off and screen auto dim. )

 

Using a win8 AW14...this solution obviously didn't work for me.

What did work, however, was updating the bios using the driver on dell's site for my machine.

I can only confirm this working for win8 machines such as my own.

Since I did it I have had 0 problems whatsoever with my usb ports and all work fine.


Driver Details | Dell US


that's the link to the driver ^

Please reply to me and let me know if anyone else has success doing this.

BTW I did this last night and just joined the forum solely to share this so I hope I get off to a good start