My daughter's computer has had some weird USB problems lately. She has five USB devices: mouse, printer, drawing tablet, scanner, and web camera. To help her run these she has a USB hub that plugs into one of the two USB ports on her computer and creates four new USB sockets. So between the remaining USB socket on her computer and the four from the hub, she's just covered for her five devices.

But these devices are not happy campers, especially the printer. When she first set up the system, the printer worked fine. But when she plugged in all the USB devices, the printer stopped working. Then we plugged the printer directly into the computer's USB port and unplugged some less essential devices, and the printer started working. Except now every time she prints, the USB mouse quits working. The goal here is to get all five devices working at the same time, so she doesn't have to constantly unplug and replug things.

Is this a simple power problem? Maybe the USB devices demand more power for data transmission than my computer and hub can provide. If so, I'll get her a second hub with its own power source, and that should fix it.

Or is this a software-side problem? She's got a VIA mobo with the latest 4-in-1 driver, so I don't know how else to jiggle things on the software side. Despite the advertising on the capabilities of USB, is there a practical limit on how many USB devices the driver or OS can handle?