Microsoft made a whoopsie
Last night (10/17/2015-10/18/2015) I get a notification that there will be updates, “Okay, good to know – my computer will restart.” I thought to myself. I went to sleep and to my absolute dismay this morning I see that my mouse and keyboard are off, but my PC is on, “That’s never a good sign”. I turn on the monitors and nothing – black screens staring at me.
The Obscure problem’s suggested fix
I turn off my computer, turn it back on – the devices still don’t light up, but I do get back into windows. That’s a good first step. Don’t bother unplug your devices and plugging them back in because they won’t do anything still.
- At the windows start screen
- Unplug your keyboard and mouse
- Plug your keyboard and mouse into your front bezel USB ports (ironic how the least reliable ports are the savior this time)
- Log into windows
- Open up the Device Manager
- You will see that your USB drivers have been knocked out (thanks Microsoft!)
- Right click on the faulty USB driver and click “Update Driver Software…”
- The driver that bugged out on me was: “Intel(R) 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller – 1C26”
- Therefore we can safely assume 1C26 is the rear bezel USB ports
- 1C2D is the front bezel USB ports
- Use “Search automatically for updated driver software” – this worked just fine
- Somewhat horrifying problem solved
Suspected update
I am not 100% sure, but I suspect it might have been this update:
- Cumulative Update for Windows 10 for x64-based Systems (KB3097617)
2016.01.16 Update
This happened again for this update KB3119142 – everything was okay for a long stretch, not really sure what the hell caused this one.
Conclusion
I’m just glad this was an easy fix, but I can’t imagine what would happen for people who don’t have a front bezel option to fall on. I suppose you would just boot into safe mode, but if your USB drivers aren’t responding at all even on startup, like it was for me, how are you supposed to do this exactly? That’s pretty bad…