Is there a difference in the amount of bus power available from different USB ports on the VAIO VGN-NW11S/S notebook?
Yesterday I bought a VGN-NW11S/S. I want to use it with a LaCie Rugged external USB 2.0 hard drive. The external hard drive works off bus power from the USB port to which it is connected.
If I connect the drive to the single USB port on the left side of the VGN-NW11S/S, everything works fine. The drive powers up and is recognised as connected.
If I connect it to either of the two USB ports on the right side of the VGN-NW11S/S, however, the drive fails to power up and it is not recognised as connected.
In case the LaCie Rugged's driver had associated itself exclusively with the left-hand USB port, I went into Windows Vista's device manager (via the control panel) and uninstalled the driver before re-connecting it to one of the right-hand USB ports. Nothing happened - Windows' device manager did not detect it and seek to install the correct driver, and the drive failed to power up. I tried it in the other right-hand USB port too with the same results. Re-connecting to the left-hand USB port, though, and the device was immediately detected and powered up, the driver installed and the additional storage space was recognised in Windows Explorer.
Is there a rational explanation for this problem?
