USB question on MacBook

[bazookaman]

My mom has a new (to her) MacBook (7,1) and she THOUGHT that one of her USB ports was messed up. She has a phone that she plugs in and a hub. The hub worked but the phone tether didn't. Or vice versa. The phone worked or a mouse worked. Etc etc. At any rate, she couldn't get her phone to show up in one port but it worked in the other. I looked in the System Profiler and one is OHCI and the other is EHCI. Does that make a difference?

And to make it worse, when she got here, both ports seemed to work. So now she has no problems. But the problems she had before continued for more than a couple days so it was persistent.

[deckeda]

What's the hub for? You mentioned phone and mouse, but she should already have 2 USB ports.

A working mouse is about the most reliable thing she can plug into her Mac. The driver will be good and it doesn't need power.

A hub may need power to work correctly, and a USB phone may need a driver that could be flaky. Either could knock out the mouse by swamping the USB bus with noise if everything isn't plugged in "just so."

Hers is the 2010 MacBook, so it has a nice glass trackpad. I'd work with her on getting comfortable with that and ditching the mouse. One less thing to mess with on USB. Lots of ways to adjust the trackpad of course. Or get a Magic Mouse.

[Jimmypoo]

bazookaman wrote:
I looked in the System Profiler and one is OHCI and the other is EHCI. Does that make a difference?

I find this amazing to learn, and will be checking my own, but one appears to be a USB 1.1, and the other
is USB 2.0 / 1.1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_controller_interface

[Jimmypoo]

Got it --- there is a standard USB bus on the computers -- it is for BlueTooth, for Infrared, etc.

The PORTED USB that exists are "AppleUSB.EHCI" - as in....

"Desktop Hi-Speed"

Host Controller Location: Built-in USB
Host Controller Driver: AppleUSBEHCI
PCI Device ID: 0x283a
PCI Revision ID: 0x0003
PCI Vendor ID: 0x8086
Bus Number: 0xfa