On Laptop - Unable to confirm SSC channel program (no flashing white) (solved)

[Corey872]

Just wanted to post this as another 'gotcha'.  Been running my laptop back and forth between reading forum posts on the couch and programming SSC's at the table.  Thought I would re-run the SSC channel set-up utility and suddenly none of my strings would 'confirm' with the white flashing code.  When they all did just 15 minutes ago!

After another 45 minutes of head scratching, I was running low on battery power and plugged my laptop into wall power.  Suddenly the SSC's all flashed the test code fine! 

Maybe running on battery puts the USB in some low power mode?  The Tx LED on the dongle still flashes as though it's receiving data, though?  Anyway, probably best to always have power plugged into the laptop (or at least make that the first thing to check if you still have troubles.)

(This still hasn't solved my Vixen won't transmit" issue, though )

[RJ]

The usb ports can be put to sleep on notebooks. We ran into this before as a issue. Was driving the person crazy until he figured it out.

RJ

[chrisatpsu]

most entry level to mid level laptops operate the usb ports as powered usb hubs when plugged into ac, and unpowered hubs, when on battery power (to preserve battery)

[tbone321]

I would say that most of the better ones also do this because their high processing speeds and multi-core processors can put a real strain on the battery and anything that can reduce the load is a good thing.  Many of the better notebooks do give an option in the power saving tab to turn this "feature" on or off, depending on the users needs.

[chrisatpsu]

The high end laptops can be setup to do this, but usually aren't as they are usually engineering laptops and the feature was usually turned off in case it was being used for something in the field. the entry level, and mid level, are setup already to low power the usb ports while on battery.
This was explained to me in orientation when i worked for Dell.

These are out of the box settings with the Operating systems already installed. you should be able to change this in power settings of the bios, or operating system. As a side note, Sony, HP, and Gateway did this as common practice as well, so i'm sure a few others would do the same.