XPS 15 L501x USB Power problems

Hello there, I've been having quite the few days lately with my L501x. I took it home with me over Christmas to have it crash on me pretty much every 10 minutes.
During this time of trying to figure out what was causing it I did a factory reinstall from the partition on the hard drive. Although that didn't really sort anything. Eventually I figured it was my wireless card or at least the driver causing the crashes. Whether it was the router I was connecting to, the network or some conflict with my sister using her Apple Mac I don't really know, but disabling the wireless signal using FN+F2 and using a wired connection went fine. - Sadly I no longer have the memory dumps from this.

Anyway my problem, since then I'm having a lot of trouble with my USB ports. They keep turning off. Now I have made sure in the battery power management I have disabled the USB sleep mode when using the battery and/or when plugged in. I have also in device manager make sure that my usb's have not got the box checked to "allow the computer to turn off this device to save power"

I will have power to my USB devices for a few minutes, not usually more than 5-20. Then it will turn off when its being used (by my mouse mainly) Unplugging and putting it back in will not reconnect the mouse or anyother devices. There is still a bit of power going through as my mouse's LED will flash for a quarter of a second but not respond. If I plug in my notebook cooler it will start running its fans.
The only way to restore power is either to restart the laptop or uninstall the drivers under "universal serial bus" in device manager and then scan for hardware changes to reinstall them where it will work for a few minutes again.

Does anyone have any idea what I could do?

 

Call Dell. It sounds like it's a hardware problem given that you've done a re-install, and they should take care of this for you. I presume you are still under warranty?

 

Yep definately should be under warranty.

Spent a while with dell on the phone where we realised the eSATA port on the right hand side was working but not enough power is getting to the USB 3.0 ports on the left and the back or does and then cuts out. Likely a hardware issue so need to wait on an Service Engineer to come out.