William Sommerwerck wrote:
Almost the first 10 years of USB were complete crap.

That might be true. My first computer with USB was purchased in 2001, and I
never had problems with USB.


These days, USB mostly works. It's still obnoxious when devices can't
handle being moved between ports though, which is proof USB or
everybody that writes device drivers are completely stupid.

Does moving a scanner between my front and rear USB port really
require a driver reinstallation? WTF?

In theory, no, but that's the way it is.

If you go to Device Manager, select Show Hidden Devices, and rummage through
the listings (especially Universal Serial Bus Controllers), you'll see a lot
of grayed USB devices. Many of these represent the /same/ device attached to
a /different/ USB jack.

In other words, the USB system organizes by ports rather than devices. If
you plug a device you've used before into a different port, USB doesn't know
this, and installs the driver for use by the new port. I don't know why it
was done this way.

I can tell you why. Everybody involved in making USB was complete ****ing
idiot.

If this bothers you, keep track of which jack you plug a device into. Make
sure that devices that often connected to the computer at the same time
don't use the same jack.

What bothers me is every person involved in the USB spec is mouth
breating, idiot. They deserve to die in an electrical fire.

By the way, it's okay to "prune" the listing of entries for devices you're
not using any more, or are duplicates. The worst that can happen is that the
device will stop working until you remove/replug the cable. A few months
back I deleted something like a hundred entries, without wrecking anything.

So the typical user is supposed to go in and look at hidden devices and
prune them away.

you call that plug and play?

I don't. I call it pure stupid. USB is a cobbled together piece of ****.
It should really have been speced to use miniDIN connectors.