When loggers disappear overnight in the MadgeTech 4 software and are seemingly nowhere to be found, this is a legitimate cause for concern.
For some, reconnecting the interface cable to their Windows computer causes the devices to appear again. If this situation sounds familiar, it may be necessary to adjust the ‘Selective USB Suspend’ setting hidden within Windows.
This setting, ‘Selective USB suspend setting’, serves to save energy when the computer isn’t being used by selectively disabling USB ports. However, these settings can occasionally interfere with the normal operation of the interface cable if Windows erroneously disables the USB port it’s connected to.
There are two ways to access and disable these settings, the first method is to:
Click the Start Menu → open Run by typing ‘Run’ and selecting the first option, then copy and paste the following line into Run and click ‘OK’.
control.exe powercfg.cpl,,1
The second way:
Open the Start Menu → type Control Panel and select the first option → Power Options → For the selected power plan, select Change plan settings → Change advanced power settings
In the menu that opens, locate ‘USB settings’, then click the plus icon to reveal the ‘USB selective suspend’ setting. Inside of ‘USB selective suspend setting’ there are two settings that can be found that might be enabled, named ‘On battery’ and ‘Plugged in’.
Click on each option and select ‘Disabled’, and then on the bottom right corner of the screen click on ‘Apply’ to save these changes. This will instruct Windows to not disable any USB ports so that future communication errors are less likely to happen with any interface cable connected to the Windows computer.
