Laptop help please

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AES

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I have a Lenovo laptop running Win 7 Pro, about 1 year old now.

Like most laptops, it has a track pad thingy but I've never been able to get on with either this one, or the one on my earlier HP laptops. So I much prefer to use an off board mini mouse, and as I fly a lot, I much prefer an optical mouse with a USB cable, not a wireless mouse.

This Lenovo has 4 off USB 3 ports (if it matters, 2 on the left, 2 on the right), and being right handed I normally plug the mouse into one of the 2 RH available ports.

Normally this works just fine, but every once in a while, after what appears to be a normal start up, the mouse is completely dead - not even the red light. But when I simply unplug from one of the USB RH ports and re-plug it into the other RH port, the mouse works fine - no re-starting the laptop or anything. So I leave it in that "2nd" RH port, and after a few absolutely normal starts, fine for a while, perhaps for a period of several days, then suddenly, next start, the mouse is dead again. Plug it back into "port 1" RH and off we go again, fine - until the next time!

The Lenovo has a fairly extensive set of fault finding routines for both hardware and software, but every time I've tried everything that looks at all appropriate, the diagnostics always come up fault free.

I have allowed Mr. Gates to automatically install his regular Win 7 updates - there have been quite a few over the last year.

This is not a huge problem but it's a bit annoying at times. If anyone has any ideas on what a fix might be (IF it's simple - VERY simple - remember you're dealing with "Mr. PC Luddite Mark 1" here!) I'd be very grateful.

P.S. I do plug other stuff such as scanners, camera, external disk, etc into the other 2 USBs from time to time, (but not permanently like the mouse) and with no such problems (so far) - they work first time every time.

TIA
AES
 
Thanks loftyhermes. I should have said, I get same problem whatever mouse I'm using (I have 2 or 3 portable mini "mouses").

AES
 
I suspect it is the Selective Suspend feature that turns off inactive USB ports to save power that is behaving inappropriately for you.

There are ways of checking this but it comes a bit problematical as it requires using a mouse or pad ( I can't get on with the things either) to access the device manager to check USB ports etc.

My local saved links show https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/817900 as addressing this problem, I had to turn off the selective suspend feature a couple of years ago for someone. It's mentioned as a workaround.
 
If it is any consolation I have a keyboard on my iMac and every so often when rebooting the iMac it refuses to recognise the keyboard. Plug in another one and it's fine. Replace the boot-up one with my normal 'faulty' one and it works OK.
 
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