How To Disable Power Management For USB Root Hubs

In some cases, USB devices may stop working, and in worse cases, a complete USB hub may stop working. USB problems are always unwelcome, but if things are working fine and suddenly USB devices do not work anymore or are not recognized, troubleshooting can prove difficult. This article has some tips regarding USB Root Hubs that might help.

Use the Device Manager to Change USB Hub Settings

If you have tried rebooting, unplugging and re-plugging, and reinstalling all necessary USB device drivers, then you might want to try disabling the power management on the USB Root Hubs in Windows. This method works just the same in all Windows versions, from Windows XP to Windows 11. Although many changes have taken place through the history of Windows, luckily the core aspects and usage of the Device Manager have remained the same.

1. In the Windows Start menu, select Run.
2. In the Run dialog box, type devmgmt.msc and click OK or press Enter.
3. In the Device Manager, locate and open the Universal Serial Bus controllers branch.
4. You should now see several USB Root Hub entries.
5. Right-click the first of the USB Root Hub entries, and in the popup menu select Properties.
   
6. In the USB Root Hub Properties dialog box, select the Power Management tab.
7. Clear the checkbox named “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power“, and click OK.
   
8. Repeat steps 5 to 7 for all USB Root Hub entries.
9. Now close the Device Manager and restart your computer.

Hopefully, the USB problems will disappear after this. If not, you can of course turn power management on again. If the USB problems do disappear, you can try to enable the power management for each of the USB Root Hubs again to save power (especially on laptops,  notebooks, and tablets). By doing it one by one you can try to identify the problematic USB hub. Do keep in mind that this requires you to keep your USB devices plugged into the same USB ports!

Disable selective suspend mode

Microsoft wrote these steps in a knowledge base article specifically for printers, but they can apply to other devices as well. A second option is to disable the suspend mode for USB host controllers by editing the Windows registry, which can be tried if disabling the power management did not solve your problems.

1. In the Windows Start menu, select Run.
2. In the Run dialog box, type regedit and click OK or press Enter.
3. In the Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services.
4. Right-click in the right-hand pane and in the context menu click New and then click Key.
   
5. Type “USB” for the new key name and press Enter.
6. With the new USB key selected in the left-hand pane, right-click in the right-hand pane again and click New.
7. Now select DWORD Value.
   
8. Type “DisableSelectiveSuspend” for the name of the new DWORD Value.
9. Double-click the new DisableSelectiveSuspend entry to edit it.
10. Change the Value data from 0 to 1 and click OK.
    
11. Close the Registry Editor.

Adding the registry key with the value 1 will disable the selective suspend mode for all USB host controllers in the PC. As mentioned earlier, keep in mind that this will affect the battery life of a portable system. To re-enable the selective suspend, change the value for DisableSelectiveSuspend to 0, or simply remove the DWORD Value from the Windows Registry altogether.

Remove all power to reset USB Root Hubs

As a last tip to troubleshoot USB device errors, consider powering off your system and completely removing all power sources. That means:

• unplug the power cable when using a desktop computer
• unplug the power cable and remove the battery for laptops and notebooks

Leave the power off for a few minutes and then plug things back on. This has been reported to fix a number of issues with USB devices that suddenly did not work or were not recognized anymore.

Related: how to check the power usage for USB devices.

Entry Filed under: Device Drivers