How I fixed my iPod not seen in windows problem

Question

This seems to be a recurring question. I was having lockup problems when trying to either update or attach iTunes to my 60 GB iPod photo. I have a windows pc running XP Pro with all the latest updates. I had the problems on iTunes 5 and the latest 6.0. I also have the latest system software (1.2) on the iPod. I observed that the problems seem to occur as soon as I had put a substantial number of songs on the iPod. I have antivirus software but determined that was not the problem since excluding the iPod for scanning and totally disabling the software did not help. I am using USB 2.0 ports for my iPod and not FireWire.
What I did that seems to have fixed the problem was to disable the power save option for the USB ports in windows. I suspect that while iTunes is cranking away trying to figure out what to do with the thousands of songs in my library, the USB port is unused enough to put it into power save mode. I could be wrong but when I disabled this feature in windows I found it immediately fixed the problem and I have not had any problems with my iPod on this computer since. Here is what to do on XP:
Go to the control panel and pull up the System control.
Get into the Hardware panel.
Go to Device Manager.
Find the Universal Serial Bus Controllers device and open it up.
You will see devices called USB root hub 2.0 and USB root hub.
Double click on them to open up the devices and get to the Power Management tab.
Disable the power save feature for them and press OK.
That should be all you need to do.
One other useful thing in power management is to see the total current drain of each of the devices on the USB ports in use. Make sure that you don't have devices on there that exceed the 500 mA that the ports can source. One iPod alone is not going to be a problem but it is worth checking if you have multiple devices on there. The power management screen on the PC will tell you what the load is from each device.
The other critical thing I found was to make sure that your iPod is charged up before you try a big update. The battery can drain in the middle of a large sync and that causes havoc because the USB port is not a battery charger even though it supplies power to the iPod.
I hope this helps. It sure helped me.

Answer 1

One other useful thing in power management is to see the total current drain of each of the devices on the USB ports in use. Make sure that you don't have devices on there that exceed the 500 mA that the ports can source.
This is a good point. USB ports are very limited in the amount of power they can supply to a device. Since the iPod is charging a rather large battery from this power, it's well worth the trouble to give the iPod it's own USB connection, one that is not shared with any other devices. Really, this isn't iPod specific, it goes for anything that's charging from the USB port.