When a favorite USB mouse stopped working last week, I tried all the usual techniques to try and get it running again: so I unplugged and reconnected it, looked for driver updates, checked Device Manager for clues, and so on -- but with no success.
Could the problem be something more fundamental? I downloaded BusDog, an open-source USB traffic sniffer to help me find out.
I launched the program, and it immediately displayed all my USB system and connected devices, including the mouse, so I could see it was being detected correctly.
The next step was to check the device traffic. It’s easy enough: just check the mouse device, click Trace, Start, then move the mouse around, and that immediately revealed the problem. A mouse should be sending USB events all the time, whenever it makes the tiniest of movements, but mine was hardly firing at all -- and that meant it was a hardware problem. Time to forget drivers and other PC tweaks, all I could do was replace the mouse.
This wasn’t the best of news, but at least BusDog had saved me from wasting any more time on the issue. And if you need to similarly check basic USB functionality on any device, then the program should work on XP or later, in both 32 and 64-bit Windows (though the latter will need TESTSIGNING enabled -- see the BusDog site for more).
The program can also sometimes help you to find out more about some USB devices. When we plugged in a couple of flash drives, for instance, the ASCII view of their events sometimes included their manufacturer, model name and other useful information. (You may not be so lucky, but if you’re trying to find out more about a device then it’s worth a try.)
And if you’re a developer or USB expert trying to diagnose low-level device issues then you’ll appreciate BusDog’s filters. By telling the program to display only events containing a particular string of characters, say, you’ll be able to tune out the USB “noise” and focus only on the data you need.
There is one issue here, though, and it’s an important one. If your system has a problem installing a USB filter driver like BusDog then it could prevent any other USB driver from loading, including those for your mouse and keyboard, effectively disabling your PC. This isn’t particularly likely, but it’s possible, so play safe: make sure you have a system restore point and a full system backup available before you launch the program.
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