Easy workaround for the USB random connect / diconnect / reconnect issue

Symptom: your laptop makes the USB connect/disconnect sounds randomly, even when no USB devices are connected to your computer

Cause: Probably some loose innards connecting an internal USB device in the laptop

The issue has been discussed in several places, for example:

https://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=178071

But I haven’t seen a solution posted, not even a workaround…

I’ve encountered this phenomena with a Dell Inspiron 1520, where the USB camera would do this constantly. It was easy to tell since the camera light / indicator flashed each time it did, but in other situations it might not be trivial to tell which device is the culprit

In any case,  you’d think disabling the defective device in the device manager would stop the annoyance – well, in my case, it didn’t

Fortunately, Nir Sofer comes to the rescue:

1. Download USBDeview and run it
2. Sort the list by the “last plug/unplug date” column (is this guy a genius or what) – the problematic device is immediately identified
3. Right click on it and choose “disconnect selected devices”

You’re done. Until you get the hardware fixed (if ever), you are no longer plagued by that infernal sound. I’m not sure if the disabling persists reboots (haven’t rebooted yet), but if not, USBDeview has a command line interface – so you can place a simple shortcut in your startup to disable the device every time the system starts