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Question for all fans of the model M keyboard and experts on USB devices:
My wife Cathy's Unicomp UB404LA has a problem. It frequently hangs up on the host USB computer's controller. Unplugging and replugging the device temporarily restores operation. My UB40PGA has never done this. Both machines run Ubuntu 13.04. There are USB mice connected to both machines and no other indications of problems with the USB subsystems.
1. Has anyone else seen this behavior?
2. Is this more likely to be a manufacturing defect in the one unit, or a generic problem? I have read that these keyboards draw 10 times more power than most.
3. What are the odds that buying a powered USB hub would solve the problem?
4. What diagnostic steps would you recommend to refine diagnosis?
My wife Cathy's Unicomp UB404LA has a problem. It frequently hangs up on the host USB computer's controller. Unplugging and replugging the device temporarily restores operation. My UB40PGA has never done this. Both machines run Ubuntu 13.04. There are USB mice connected to both machines and no other indications of problems with the USB subsystems.
1. Has anyone else seen this behavior?
2. Is this more likely to be a manufacturing defect in the one unit, or a generic problem? I have read that these keyboards draw 10 times more power than most.
3. What are the odds that buying a powered USB hub would solve the problem?
4. What diagnostic steps would you recommend to refine diagnosis?
View 17 previous comments
+Cathy Raymond To be sure the problem isn't related to broken cable you could try to bend cable while keyboard is connected to computer, especially on side where it enters the keyboard. If no keyboard reconnect will be logged to system log after cable manipulation, this is definitely power problem.Jun 23, 2013
+Cathy Raymond, the several months of working fine, could that have stopped around the same time 13.04 was installed? Or is there an environmental change that could have coincided? I had an ATX box on a stone floor that started being erratic, e.g. seizing during boot, after a couple of years and it was the cold coupled with degrading capacitors in the power circuitry. Insulating it with a few sheets of corrugated cardboard added underneath and letting it warm up idling at the BIOS let it boot fine. As did summer.Jun 23, 2013- Given the predilections for nipples and balls, another test is to return to the normal state, observe the fault occurring, then try to remove any other USB devices that may also be drawing power. Perhaps a spike from one of them makes the keyboard drop out.Jun 23, 2013
+Ralph Corderoy
Nope. It stopped working well before +Eric Raymond installed Ubuntu 13.04 on my machine.Jun 23, 2013
And again, you can verify the power draw with a meter. Or, just replace the power supply. You may not even need higher wattage; cheap power supplies are the cause of many, many hardware issues. I recommend checking out the PSUs from OCZ / PC Power and Cooling, Seasonic or Antec. These are widely recognized as among the best.Jun 23, 2013
I have been using a UB4044A (http://pckeyboard.com/page/product/UB4044A) keyboard for the past three years with 0 issues.Jul 2, 2013
