What does "USB selective suspend" mean?

Anonymous
2010-10-14T06:39:16+00:00

In Windows 7, Power Options->USB Settings->USB selective suspend setting, what does "USB selective suspend" mean?  Also, given that there is only one setting, why does it say "USB Settings" instead of "USB Setting"?

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Devices and drivers

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Anonymous
2011-02-17T03:53:10+00:00

A USB device driver can send a message to windows telling it to idle the device.  This puts the device in a low-power state (the suspend state).  When a USB device is suspended, windows does not wait for it to respond before entering a sleep or hibernate mode.  If you disable this feature, the system will simply return a failure to the driver when the driver attempts to enter suspend state.  If the driver complies with Microsoft guidelines, it will simply retry the idle request at every expiration of its idle timer.

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  1. Anonymous
    2014-12-21T04:37:09+00:00

    you have it all wrong guys. Selective suspend means that WINDOWS is asking the DEVICES to idle out before going to sleep to avoid driver corruption and data loss for devices such as external hard drives. It also filters out mouse and keyboard if BIOS "Wake from Keyboard/Mouse" is enabled. drivers cannot ask windows anything. Windows, the OS makes all the requests to the devices. Selective Suspend is merely Windows trying to suspend all drivers that prevent windows from going to sleep if in use or are needed. It sends the requests to external USB devices such as Hard Drives, USB Thumb Drives and Other devices like USB WiFi adapters. Even things such as CPU and internal HDD devices get suspended (even in the S1 Sleep State; S3 Sleep State suspends all devices but RAM) and the lot.

    SOURCE:

    Mac/PC Computer Tech for 13 years.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-11-21T17:15:03+00:00

    Why would a USB device driver send a message to Windows telling it to idle the device? Could a mouse or keyboard have such functionality? Would having this USB selective suspend enabled allow the keyboard or mouse to freeze up by going into a suspended state? I'm looking at this because I'm troubleshooting problems involving the freezing of both my keyboard and mouse at irregular intervals.

    In USB, there is such a thing as a "composite device" which means different devices (simple example, webcam with a microphone) exist on the same physical device.  These have separate drivers.  Let's say you have two functions, A & B.  Function A is idle, and wants to be a good citizen and power down to save power so it issues a selective suspend.  But Function B is still in active use.  Since these functions are on the same physical device, there needs to be a mechanism for all functions to say they want to power down and when there is consensus, the device is suspended.

    I hope this contributes to the conversation.

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-11-04T19:18:27+00:00

    We are having some issues with usb headphones that stop working during some online assessments and instruction with students.

    We have two different types of headphones (Egghead USB Multimedia Headset and Microsoft Lifechat LX-3000) and two browsers (Chrome and IE11), that both have issues.

    Unplugging them and replugging them when they stop creating sound from the website fixes the issue (not sound from windows however as i can hear the ding when I try to adjust the sound level on the speaker in the systray).  This is not practical as happens fairly frequently to a lab of 36 computers.

    We have also looked into start-control panel-hardware & sound-power options-change plan settings-change advanced plan settings-usb settings-usb selective suspend settings-change to disabled.  Not sure if this is helping yet.

    We have a gigabit network and a 500/500 FiOS line

    I have double checked the firewall settings.

    Any other ideas?

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-07-19T18:52:31+00:00

    "Google is your friend"?

    Why didn't YOU Google it and return the results/answer to this thread?

    It would of saved me typing this! LOL

    This thread is old but I installed a Microsoft 200 Keyboard and had random on/off issues

    Yaqub K  

    Microsoft Support Engineer

    Replied with this

    • Press Windows Key + X.
    • Select Power Options.
    • Next to your currently selected plan, click Change Plan Settings.
    • Click Change advanced power settings.
    • Click the box to expand USB Settings, then expand USB selective suspend settings.
    • Click the drop down menu and select disabled.

    Had since swap the 200 KB out but am going to swap it back to see if this works

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