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I reattach dozens of USB devices to my Windows 7 across the day, such as printers, flash drives, mice, modems, midi keyboards, and scanners. The computer has seen them all before; all have been set up previously.

Yet in most cases, Windows takes 20-60 seconds to finish initialising the device and get it ready for use. Is there a way via software to cut this time short?

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Slower processors and system bus's take longer. I noticed this on my netbook, it takes much longer to mount usb devices than my more powerful notebook with a core i5. –  Moab Jun 13 '11 at 21:43
if your base problem is a lack of USB ports, i recommend getting a 7-8 port USB hub; it saved me daily attachment exercises, forever. –  icelava Jun 28 '11 at 6:33
The only thing that comes to mind is to use something like RT7Lite to remove all drivers from the installation itself that you don't need, and defrag your hard drive. –  Breakthrough Jul 5 '11 at 0:15

2 Answers 2

up vote 5 down vote accepted

Some possible reasons and solutions :

  1. The USB hub or some ports on it might be flaky. (Does this happen on all ports and all hubs?)
  2. Enable USB legacy features in your BIOS
  3. Delete all USB ghosts by cleaning out all registry entries in
  4. "Complete" USB driver renewal as described in this answer
  5. Disable searching Windows Update for device drivers

For obvious reasons, take good backups before starting out, including creating a system restore point.

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I find that if I attach the same device to the same USB port there is no wait time. It seem like a device is installed properly on one of the UBS ports and as soon as I attach it to a different port it needs to be re-installed.

This might not be what you are looking for but try it out, might work for you.

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And this, of course, is the correct answer: Different port means different instance. As such, the drivers will be installed again. This is also easily visible if you force Device Manager to reveal non-present devices. –  Daniel B Jul 25 at 20:17

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