Front USB ports do not work – What can I do to bring them back to life?

I’ve got a Dell Dimension 9100 which has 7 USB slots, 5 on the back & 2 on the front. All 5 on the back work fine. 2 on the front have never worked, however a little while ago one on the front used to come out with an error message of ‘Device has malfunctioned……’ if a USB device was plugged into it, the other one on the front did not respond at all if something was plugged into it.

Now the one that used to come up with an error message has become like the other one, no response irrespective if something is plugged in or not.

All 5 USB ports on the back are in use, so not sure if that may be playing a part in there being not enough power?? for the front ports!

How do I go about getting the front USB ports both active again? As it would be handy to have for plugging a USB pen drive into, as opposed to having to remove another USB device at the back of the PC & try and plug it into there.

turn power off..Take the cover off and follow the cable from the frt ports and see if the connection to the mother board is loose. reseat it after you turn the power off. turn power back on and test them again. if you still get errors check dell website and see if there is an update you need for the motherboard or the usb controller. if you still have problems..then their is a hardware issue

I would open up the case and check tha the front usb ports are correctly connected to the motherboard... but if it's in warranty, I would phone dell support first and go through their troubleshooting and get it sorted that way.

Thanks. Opened up case, to find out that the connection had become loose & had nearly fallen out of the connection socket.

Can’t believe it was that simple, was expecting it to be a bit more complicated than that :o

sometimes you get lucky ;)