When USB Ports Don't Play Well Together, Hell and Keyboards Freeze Over

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Keyboard Freeze, Mouse Hesitation and USB Weirdness

I know, this is not an Ubuntu issue as much as it is a general computing issue; still I think it is important to document and distribute, no matter what Operating System (OS) you use—mine just happens to be Ubuntu.

The Issue

In the past three to six months I have been experiencing "freezes" of both my keyboard (primarily) and my mouse (occasionally). After considerable research (including the mostly-worthless forums) and trying the few "solutions" that seemed reasonable, I was unable to avoid the issue just described. As I make my living as a blogger, Substack writer and book editor/author, having my keyboard seize up at what seemed like random times was an issue that really needed a fix. One of the few things that I tried as a triage that sometimes worked was to remove and reinsert the USB dongle (nano-receiver) for my wireless mouse and keyboard (one dongle shared by the two devices). Usually that allowed me to start typing again, but sometimes for only a few letters or words before the keyboard froze again.  I tried going away and leaving my computer to "rest" for awhile. I tried plugging the keyboard/mouse dongle into other open usb slots. I even blamed the whole thing on some "secret" thing that Ubuntu must have done to jiggle the memory refresh on the new OS, and at another point I fell prey to the false-fixit-prophets of the ethereal forums and kept my browser closed while trying to squeeze out a few moments of unfrozen keyboard bliss. 

Resolved

I finally ran across this article—just before I was about to wipe my Ubuntu installation and go with Mint or some other Linux OS,—and a good thing it was, because it turns out that there is no OS (including Windows or Mac, from what I can gather) that was going to fix my problem. It turns out that USB 3.0 AND 2.0 PORTS DON'T ALWAYS GET ALONG. Now, to completely understand my problem and how I fixed it, I think you really need to see the USB port configuration on my desktop pc, so here it is. 

There are two USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports on the front (items (4 and 5), with four USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports on the back (items 6, 11 and 12 respectively). (That's right: I have TEN USB ports on my desktop pc, one of the reasons why I will not give it up until it dies an unresurrectable (new word) death). 

For the entire time that I was having my keyboard/mouse freeze issue, the USB dongle was plugged into one of the ports on the front of my computer. But so was a WD MyPassport (most of the time) and another WD MyPassport (occasionally). And I never paid any attention to whether one or all were plugged into a 2.0 or a 3.0 port, which turns out to be a big oversight on my part.

Long story short: Plugging the mouse/keyboard dongle into any port on the front of the computer resulted in freeze-ups as long as I had the MyPassport plugged into a front-panel port at the same time. 

THE SOLUTION

I relocated my mouse/keyboard dongle to a USB port on the backside of my computer.  Problem solved, but you can read more about why this solution worked here.

P.S. As always, a "stick-in-the-eye" award to all the engineers and software developers and their wannabe's for wasting my time with worthless technical babble, guesses, myths and techno-soothsaying. That goes double for StackExchange, for which I seem to be banned for life. Hmmmmm....wonder why?