You enter the BIOS at bootup. Check that your USB ports are enabled. When XP
boots up go into the DEVICE MANAGER and check your USB settings.


"leyjfk" wrote in message
...
my parents bought a windows xp home edition computer last
christmas. the usb port has never worked, not for our
printer or our handspring visor cradles. i checked to
make sure the port was attached to the motherboard, plus
cleaned all the dust inside the computer case. i went to
device manager, which said that the usb root hub and the
universal host controller are both working properly. i
tried uninstalling the hardware and then reinstalling it,
but the port is still not recognized. i tried to get into
bios and check the irq for usb but i can't even restart my
computer properly to get the prompt for bios -- the
computer hangs at "windows is shutting down"!
i checked the windows support site and found a few
updates/service packs that claim to fix the shutting down
problem at least, but each take approximately 90 min. to
download. is there anything i can try/do that would be a
lot simpler???
-leyjfk