I've always been puzzled by these apparently standard behaviours in Windows 98SE, 2000, and XP (not tested on others):
When spinning up a CD, almost everything appears to pause/hang/lock up.
USB device drivers are loaded per-port, with drivers taking ages to "detect" when plugged into a "new" port, and multiple copies of a driver appearing in the device manager for each port the device was plugged into.
why is.... those things?
Posted Jul 9, 2010, 3:45 PM UTC
[deleted]
I wondered if it was IRQ's too - but http://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/cnqll/windows_machine_curiosities/c0twaas
I've had optical drives lock up my system when spinning up. I think it was ultimately it was a failing optical drive--not sure how or why it locked up my system, but it was pretty common.
The CD spinning up = locking up problem has happened with every machine I've ever owned, with windows 98SE, 2000, and XP, through all 2000 and XP service packs, with internal IDE drives connected to motherboards and to PCI RAID cards, and with external USB drives.
in the case of USB, devices are identified by windows by a unique internal serial number, which is then assigned to the 1 port it is using. So if you then plug the device into ANOTHER port, windows has to assign another instance of that serial number to the new port, even though it has "seen" the device before
http://rtshiva.com/2009/05/19/usb-specification-and-windows-limitation-on-serial-numbers/
Interesting. Thanks for explaining this.
I recently tried a linux liveCD (gparted) and was pleasantly surprised when I began experimenting plugging in a USB mouse/keyboard to various ports (felt like a madman, unplugging and-replugging the keyboard, muttering "hmmm, interesting!") and found a very different behaviour.