I have a Dell Inspiron running XP home. USP ports all suddenly stoppd working. I found article by Brian Posey of Tech Republic July 30 2003 and folowed his suggs. I have a Dell XP Home Installation disk from 2004. I think my machine was mfgrd in 2009. It is model 1011. I opened Device Mgr. and found all USB controllers with red X (disabled). I clicked to enable and got yellow “!”symbol. But when I tried to use “update driver” option,. it would not install a driver with notice saying “USB controller Driver Installation File missing or lacking a necessary entry. Perhaps because the INF was written for WIN95 or later” I also tried to copy file from the installation disk, but was unsuccessful. I got a message from this attempt saying that the install disk was written before the version of XP Home that I have on my machine. It suggested I install the older version of XP from the disk I have tried many options both on the computer and from the disk. Before all this happened, I was using a Microsoft S/2 mouse for a long time and never any problems with any USB ports. There are 4 and all the same, inoperative. Btw, the ports will put out current (can run external drive and air fan in stand undereath the computer.) I know this is an old machine, but I was planning to give it to a granchild.
Do you have any ideas for a fix for this? Tks for your help in the past.