How To Troubleshoot USB Bandwidth Issues
This is part two of my USB videos. This video shows the computer maintenance student how to see the available bandwidth being used by each USB hub. For more information be sure to check out my website for the accompanying materials.
Step 1:
I'm Scott Ford for mrfordsclass.com, and in this presentation we're going to follow up on a different video about USB. In this one we're going to talk about the bandwidth available as well as how to troubleshoot it on your computer.
Step 2:
You might recall from the previous video, as well as maybe lecture or a book that the maximun number of devices that can go into one USB hub is a theoretical 127 devices. Thats one-two-seven. You learn that the speeds of the USB, USB, the old one, the 1.1, can go a maximum speed of 12 Mega Bits per second , that's bits, that's the smalll one, per second.or 1.5 Mega-Bytes per second. USB 2, the high speed USB, can go to a maximum speed of 480 MegaBits per second, or 60 Mega-Bytes per second. So USB 1, 12 Megabits per second, 1.5 MegaBytes, USB 2-0 480 MegaBits per second, or 60 megabytes per second.
Step 3:
But this is not per device. It's like a cable. If you've ever had a cable network. Everyone on that connection is sharing the maximum bandwidth, is sharing the maximum speed. If you are in an office situation or a school situation, when you log on the first thing in the morning when everyone comes to work you have a very slow connection. Everything kind of runs slower. Its kind of like a highway. If you have a four lane highway and the speed limit is 70 miles an hour, yes, that may be the maximum speed you can go. But depending on how many cars are on that road, your speed can decrease. Of course living in Houston, its a little bit different out here. But, its a bandwidth. Its a maximum speed shared by all devices. So if I have 10 USB devices through one USB hub, all ten devices are sharing that speed.
Step 4:
Lets see how we can look at, to find out if we're having a problem with our USB connection. We go to our ever popular Start button. To our Control Panel. Of course we're going to try to get the Device Manager. So we're going to look at our System button right here. Double Click. Look at our Hardware Tab, then look at Device Manager. Again, from the other video, this might take a little bit of time depending on your computer as well as what you have running on it.
Step 5:
I'm going to look down here at my Universal Serial Bus Controller Button. Now, if you remember from the previous video, we showed you how to see how much electricity is being used, and that was right clicking on the Hub, going to Properties, and looking at Power. We are not doing that this time. We are going to look at the maximum bandwidth used by that host, that Hub. So we're going to go up here to the top area and we're going to look here. So I'm going to right click on this, and I'm going to go to Properties. I'm going to go to my Advanced tab. This shows me the bandwidth that's being used by that root hub. By that one USB connection, that one big trunk that everything can kind of branch off from. So ten percent of that total bandwidth is being used.
Step 6:
Let’s look at my next one. Properties. Advanced. That one is having 21 per cent of its bandwidth used. Let’s take a quick look at some of the other ones to see if we can find anything really bizarre here. Ten percent. Ten percent. Ten percent. So nothing really unusual going on here. If I had a USB port that had a hub in it and I had connected devices and another hub, and let’s say my mouse wasn't working right, or my camera wasn't working right, or my webcam wasn't working right, and I had eliminated all other possibilities, I would probably want to take a look here and see if maybe I was using up the maximum bandwidth.
Step 7:
Also, not officially part of this video, but something that's also pretty cool to know. If you might have USB 1.1 or USB 2.0 compatibility. Remember USB 2.0 is backwards compatible with all the previous versions.
Step 8:
What does this mean? If you are familiar with the XBox game system , Microsoft's XBox game system. If you purchased the XBox , the original one, one year. Bought a bunch of games and then purchased an XBox360, you can still play the old games on the XBox360. It is backwards compatible. So, 2-0 is backwards compatible with the older stuff. To find out if you have 2-0, you want to look for this little word here: Enhanced Host Controller. Enhanced Host Controller means you have USB 2-0 installed on your computer. If its missing, you don't have USB 2-0, and you just have USB 1.
Step 9:
So, we showed you how to check the bandwidth available on your USB controller.Hope you enjoyed it, got something out of it, and we'll see you for our next presentation. Goodbye.
