I have a Toshiba Tecra M2V-S310 laptop PC with Windows XP. A week ago I inserted a friend's flash drive into my USB port to drag something from his drive. My laptop choked a bit, slowed down and I got an error sound, so I pulled the drive out immediately. A few days later, I started getting the random Blue Screen Of Death with the message IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, at which point I am forced to restart. I see an Unknown Device in my Device Manager, and after doing some reading up online about this problem I see that it is sometimes caused by something to do with not fully installing new hardware, I assume this has a lot to do with the problem. As a temporary fix I always uninstall the Unknown Device every time the Blue Screen Of Death forces me to restart, which buys me an extra 45 minutes or so of laptop time, but every time I am eventually but inevitably forced to restart, I got back to the Device Manager and lo and behold the Unknown Device has returned, along with a prompt on my desktop to Install New Hardware.
I am currently out of town and since all my work is computer-related, this is completely screwing my world up right now. Does anyone have any kind of input or advice? Unfortunately, since I'm out of town I am not able to plug in the flash drive that supposedly started this problem to uninstall it properly, so that's not an option. I posted this query several days ago, and someone suggested I delete all the icons in my Universal Serial Bus section of Device Manager, so that the necessary ones would automatically reinstall themselves and the erroneous one wouldn't. Only problem is, everything reinstalled - the valid icons and the erroneous one as well. Back to square one. Someone else suggested that my USB port might be fried, and that the only recourse is to get a new one. If that's the case I'm willing and ready to get a new one, but I'd like to exhaust all other options before I go there, obviously. A million thanks in advance for any advice anyone can give me. I'm really between a rock and a hard place right now.
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