Garmin Oregon 450 fried USB on motherboard

[justlooking0]

Well, my Windows XP Gateway computer is now mostly back in working order after a horrifying experience.

 

But I thought I'd post my experience to save others the grief I've just been through.

 

After getting a brand-spanking new Garmin Oregon for Xmas, I downloaded the Garmin USB drivers, installed them, hooked up the Oregon 450 to a USB port, and started a map copying onto it. It cheerfully told me it was getting power off the USB port, instead of using batteries, and I didn't give that a second thought. Left the room for a few mins, & when I came back, the GPS was powered down, and no input device worked, except the power-cycle button.

 

After much teethgnashng, and trying everything, it turned out that it had fried the USB hub built into the motherboard. This was much harder to figure out than you'd expect: because I only had USB keyboards an mice, I couldn't even get the system to boot in safe mode, and because my bios wasn't set up to automatically boot from CD, it took some doing to conclude I needed a PS2 keyboard and mouse. The ports failed in a way that still left some power going to them, and they still appeared in Device management as "working". I tried rolling back drivers, restoring to a previously working system restore point, uninstalling, powering off & waiting for the system power supply to drain, re-installing the OS, before finally thinking of trying Ubuntu. Which also couldn't find any USB devices.

 

I had to go out and get a PCI USB card, and a powered hub to replace all the ports I had been using. (TG I had a slot free: replacement motherboard would have been $$$.)

 

Lessons:

1) Garmins should not suck so much power from USB ports, that they can fry a motherboard. Yes, I had other devices plugged in. but none of them were sucking that much power.

2) NEVER, EVER PLUG YOUR GPS DIRECTLY INTO YOUR COMPUTER's USB PORTS. Get a powered hub, and connect through that. That way, when it fries a port, you just have to toss the hub, not perform internal surgery on your computer. And woe betide you, if you did that to a laptop.

3) Always have PS2 Keyboards and mice available.

4) Just because your optical mouse or USB key flashes intermittently when plugged into a USB port, doesn't mean the port isn't fried.

5) Gateway recovery is very nice: it just moved the entire existing contents of my C: drive into a backup folder, before letting Window go ahead and rebuild everything. (I don't regret the time I spent backing up my files to an external drive before the re-install. But it was very sweet to be able to just move files back to where they belonged, instead of slowly copying them back.)

 

(And no, I haven't had the guts to plug my Garmin Oregon 450 back in to download anything. I want to get a disposable hub first. And I'm still tripping over things I need to reinstall. Fortunately, many of my day-to-day pgms were portable, & could easily be gotten running again with a simple copy.)

[+Z_Statman]

I don't mean to be a smart @#$ but this does sound a bit odd and an unlikely event caused but the GPSr or any other USB device - There simply isn't that much power going through them.

 

Did you contact Gateway? My belief is that the hardware was faulty

[snowfleurys]

I have been using my OR300 on the USB port on my laptop for nearly 14 months without a problem - actually one of the few things which have not gone 'bad' on that computer.

With all the non-USB problems I have had with this Gateway; all indications are even a $900 Gateway computer is cheeply built junk.

[+splashy]

You are new and making the wrong conclusions.

If you know what's on my Usb's sometimes, including an Oregon 550

Fact is, things go wrong many times when they are new or just bought, still I think you have to find a

solution to this at the computermaker.

[+arcs]

Yeah, I have to agree with the replies - I've had my 550 hooked up to several different computers for hours at a time with no issues. The draw of the Oregons is very low. If your unit had a dead short, I think it would be the oregon that would be toast, not the other way round. I suspect it was coincidence that you had it plugged in when the port failed.

All I know is I'm loving my 550.

[+ecanderson]

To the OP - before you blame the Oregon, you can determine whether your board's USB host even has overcurrent protection. Download here a Microsoft program that will inspect the USB interface: http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Utilities/usbview.zip

 

At the level just below the "Host Controller, you'll see individual entries for each port -- will look like "[PIP somenumbers] RootHub" -- select and view the results on the right side.

 

What does it show for the value to the right of "Over-current Protection:"

 

Only a pretty sleazy USB host won't try to protect itself.

[jholly]

To the OP - before you blame the Oregon, you can determine whether your board's USB host even has overcurrent protection. Download here a Microsoft program that will inspect the USB interface: http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Utilities/usbview.zip

 

At the level just below the "Host Controller, you'll see individual entries for each port -- will look like "[PIP somenumbers] RootHub" -- select and view the results on the right side.

 

What does it show for the value to the right of "Over-current Protection:"

 

Only a pretty sleazy USB host won't try to protect itself.

Tried it, Some say No over-current protection (bus power only). Good or bad?

Edited January 17, 2011 by jholly

[robertlipe]

USB was my day job for many years. Current limiting is required in all compliant products. Nothing should "fry". You can solder all four wires together and not damage USB products where the designers even bothered to look at the specs.

 

While I've had beefs with other details of Garmin's USB implementations through the years (and have sent them packet traces from protocol analyzers costing about as much as a car) they actually get power management right; they simply don't request or draw more than the prescribed 500mA - and even if they did, a sensible HCI wouldn't "fry".

 

Is it possible that your USB hub/port broke? Of course. I'm skeptical that your Oregon broke it and don't agree with your categorical advice

[+ecanderson]

 

Tried it, Some say No over-current protection (bus power only). Good or bad?

Not great. What you want to see is "Individual". I believe what you've got will protect the motherboard from the host chip, but not the host chip from devices.

[chuckr30]

It wouldn't surprise me that you had a power surge at the wrong time, and it happened to fry your internal USB hub. At an old apartment, my voltage went up to 138vac all the time. I was puzzled when my UPS would magically shut off, but it did that because IT'S SUPPOSED TO. I reprogrammed the safe voltage range for my UPS and it all worked fine, until the voltage went even higher! 140vac.

 

To say that your power company regulates your voltage to 110vac is really a misnomer. And that's why you get a UPS.

[+ecanderson]

Could as easily as not be a problem with static electricity. This time of year, especially in homes heated with gas and without humidification, it's easy to be zapping things constantly.

 

Before you grab that flying USB cable, touch the top of the case and discharge yourself first. They manufacturers of computer bits should be able to survive the nasty IEC static discharge test if they carry a CE label, but that's not saying that they all do so.

[+shutle64]

USB is pretty robust in the power management. The controller shuts down the port if it uses too much power or grounds out, and it doesn't need to shut off the computer to do this. If the port was going to fail, it could of fail on any device. I have my Oregon 400T plugged in and it's allocated at 500 mA, but a device that normally runs on 2 AAs isn't using 500 mA@ 3.30 volts. I would be more worried about the computer wiping out my devices (iphone, ipod, ipads, gps, etc) than the device wiping out the USB port. If your computer can't supply the power to the USB port, maybe this could be a power supply issue of not receiving enough power from the power supply. A aging power supply looses available watts over the years, and a failing power supply will shutdown a computer if the draw is more than it can handle.