For the last several months I have had intermittent problems with two devices connected with USB. Note my computer is normally on 24/7 and goes into sleep mode after 2 hours.
1. APC Back-UPS RS 800VA (800VA UPS with USB connection to PC)
Observations:
Several times a week the status would show a switch to battery power for a second. A few times the UPS alarm would go off saying the battery was failing. Once in a while the UPS self test would fail indicating a failing battery.
Conclusions:
Normally I would think that the battery really was failing but the problems always happened after the computer came out of sleep mode. The UPS communicates with the PC using a USB connection. I started to wonder whether there was something going on with the USB after sleep mode.
2. Hauppauge WinTV DCR-2650 (digital TV tuner with USB connection to PC)
Observations:
Some times after coming out of sleep mode the TV tuner does not come back online. It no longer shows up in the device manager. I usually can get it to come back if I unplug/plug in the USB connection.
Conclusions:
Yesterday I ran CPU-Z and was perplexed to see that my BIOS was ver. F6. I checked back to screenshots I made last June that the BIOS was ver. F9 back then. I checked with the Gigabyte web site that showed that my AMD FX-8350 required BIOS ver. F9. A few months I remembered a stange error with something to do with the BIOS after coming out of sleep mode. What must have happened was that DualBIOS had kicked in and switched my BIOS back to its previos version. I have now reinstalled BIOS ver. F9.
Could BIOS ver. F6 have been the cause of problems with USB the last several months? Even it is I am not sure if all my problems will be gone with sleep mode now that I have the correct BIOS again. Sleep mode has always been kind of flaky with this motherboard. Ever since I have been using sleep mode I would occasionaly have to reboot to correct minor software problems. For example, Comcast's CallerID and Data Usage Meter could not log back in to Comcast's servers after coming out of sleep mode.
