Avraham Bernholz wrote:

Sounds like you got some of a bad batch of cables.

I wonder if there is a way to tell if a cable is good
*before* you buy it?

Price ? Brand ? If the cable comes from a supplier with enough of a name to
care about quality control (and therefore test the stuff they get from the
/actual/ supplier) then that's probably the best you can do. In particular if
it comes from a brand that you have had good quality (not necessarily premium
priced) stuff from before.

Perhaps also a visual inspection of the overall build quality will tell you
something about the quality control, but it's difficult to see how to apply
that effectively to something as simple as USB cables.

-- chris