Today Michael (mum’s boyfriend) was trying to install a printer onto Mum’s computer, connected via a 4m USB cable, but it wasn’t detecting it when he plugged it into any of the USB ports. So then I tried moving it to my computer and it worked. Then I tried sharing it from my computer, only to be met with something I have never seen before with printer sharing: it asked for a username and password. What. The. Fuck.
Anyway, so I moved it back to Mum’s computer and it still didn’t detect it. Michael and I played around with it for about another hour and during that time I was so adamant that it was the cable. I didn’t know how, I just knew it was the cable. So after Michael suggesting that no way in Hell could it be the cable, I decided I would go out and buy a cable.
I bought a 2m cable from D’Ambra Computers, plugged it in and it automatically detected the printer.
Now here’s my train of thought on this issue (and it could be totally wrong): because the cable was 4m longer the voltage sent from the USB ports on the computer wasn’t powerful enough to go all the way to the end of the cable and then come back on Mum’s computer which is a 400W Acer PSU. Because we’ve put mum’s old hard drive in there, there might have not been enough power to go the full length any more. My computer has a 600w Thermaltake PSU in it and the printer worked fine in it. Buying the shorter cable meant that the power was able to get all the way to the printer and therefore Windows detected it. This would also explain why were able to plug in devices with much shorter cables than the old printer cable like both the iPods into different ports and another mouse.
So if a printer isn’t being detected when it should be, try using a shorter cable. It might just do the trick.