Multiple failures.

Alright, recently my laptop has been acting up quite strangly and I have no idea why.

Untill recently, all of the deviced on my computer worked perfectly. All USB ports are USB 2.0


First, a few weeks ago my iPod would occasionally disconnect randomly. It would usually say something along the lines of 'This device can perform faster if it were connected to a USB 2.0 port'. At this point, my other USB connected devices worked fine. I put this down to a fault in my iPod and intended to have it checked at an apple store some time in the future. Then it would occasionally reconnect and disconnect randomly.

Then recently my sound card started to act up. Sometimes it just won't play sounds when I start up. The play buttons on sound playback programs is simply greyed out, while other programs just won't play back sound. The volume control item on the task bar doesn't appear either.
This will happen around 50% of the times I start up.


Then, tonight, it suddenly decided to stop recognising my Wacom tablet (the last straw as far as I'm concerned). At first it would waver between being connected and not. And now it just isn't recognised when I plug it in. I've reinstalled and updated the driver to no avail.

However, my optical mouse still works fine. No matter what USB port I use the mouse will work, while the Tablet and iPod won't be recognised. This and the fact that the devices have stopped working makes me think that there's something wrong with the software, and I hope so because I'd rather not have to pay for laptop repairs.

Also, I've not been able to reformat my laptop for one and a half years (around 6 months more than I usually would). I'm not sure if that could be a cause.


Any idea what the problem could be?