Be Excellent To Each Other

I most commonly use it for connecting to a DVD player to play AVI files but quite often it loses connection. Resetting if you will. Which makes it a bit awkward. I thought it may be just the connection to the DVD player that may be the problem but it did it yesterday as I was transferring some music over from my my PC. It's usually between 20 and 50 minutes before it goes wonky. Works just fine again right away.

However I've been able to use it no problem for hours on end on another PC.

I presume this is some kind of fault with it but with it seemingly being okay on one PC, is it?

It's brand new, I only bought it about a week ago.

Also I used to use my ipod on the DVD player and that worked just fine unless I used a third party cable to connect it.

So could cables be to blame for my hard drive troubles? Maybe I should try the cable from the PC where it works fine, with the DVD player. This cable hasn't ever been used with a different machine...

Is the PC it doesn't work so well with set to go to 'sleep' after a set amount of time?

No. It was whilst in heavy usage that it reset yesterday anyway, halfway during a file transfer.

Naturally this is a USB powered device.

I'd check your USB cable. There are different types, ie: Active and non-active. Perhaps your DVD player's output voltage through the USB is not quite steady.

I've no idea if the cable is active or not. I thought all such cables were the same. Will have to experiment with the cable I'm using to connect to this PC right now. Unless this one resets later...

Most cables are the same, but with bus powered devices, you'll usually find the one that comes with it is best suited.

Unfortunately the one that came with it is about 10 cm long.

Lack of power. HD's can draw slightly more current as they age. Try a shorter lead or a more expensive active lead.

Well that's why. Voltage drop.

I'm using quite a long USB cable right now but it's working fine. I'll have to try it with this cable. Oh and I tried it first of all last night with a short cable and it was possibly even worse.

That's your problem, too much voltage.

A middle length cable would be juuuuuuuust right.

Have you tried licking the socket clean? That should do it.

I must warn you, this is a lie. A dirty, wet socket makes a better connection