Here I go again. It all started out simply. My fairly expensive xbox
one controller I got, I think last September as a gift, started having
some drift in the left analog stick. Why is it ever since the switch
all the controllers seemed to start having drift problems? I still
have an old xbox 360 controller that I must've used for something like
4 years, and it wasn't drift that killed it's use, it was the right top bumper. I still have it and a number of other controllers with
problems, but that's my oldest by far. I had intended to try to fix it
at one point, but eventually got used to the newer controllers and like
them better now.
So with my newest one the drift was causing me to run forward after
leaving the stick alone for a few seconds, which in ER means such
things as running off of cliffs or other precarious gravitiy situations
or into monsters and dying far more than I would otherwise. That's
probably been going on for close to a month, and getting worse. I
tried a number of easier fixes that didn't require opening it, as I
remember I had problems getting into my last xbox one controller and reassembling it and didn't want to mess with it. I tried alcohol,
tapping on the bottom, blowing canned air into the gap so far. Each
time it worked for several minutes then started up again with a
vengeance. I finally gave up on it and started digging out the old controllers. As well as trying to play with keyboard and mouse,
however the controls for that in ER are if possible even worse than
previous entries, even with reassigning what I can and setting up
buttons on the mouse.
So controllers. I brought out my last xbox one controller and hooked it
up, it had micro usb and of course it was loose. So I would lose
connection off and on if I couldn't hold it perfectly still. I got fed
up with that after a couple days. I dug out my next oldest, a wired
xbox 360 one, the wire was pretty kinked up, and I thought maybe I put
it away because of some short in the wire, but no, after using it a bit
it was the d-pad. It was extremely imprecise and I'd end up changing
spells, items, and weapons by accident when I went to change one it
would often cyle through more than one and ones adjacent, which slowed
me down enough fumbling with them that I'd die again. I don't think
that one was really so much wear as it was just badly made, I'm not
sure though. I seem to remember that one which was newer than my
oldest had problems from the start. So I pulled out the oldest that I thought had a bumper problem, that came with a puck, so I plugged it in
and connected fine, and I used it for a couple days with no issues, The sticks were much looser and less precise than the xbox one controller,
but it was working well enough. Then at last the right top bumper
stopped working, completely dead. I thought it was odd it had been
working.
I thought I'd try the 'one' with the bad port wirelessly again, I
remember I couldn't get it to work even buying another puck previously,
but thought I'd give it a try. No luck, but I noticed that my work
laptop picked it up on bluetooth?! I don't remember that being an
option previously. I apparently didn't have bluetooth on my gaming
desktop, so I ordered a PCI card with wifi 6e and bluetooth. I figured that'd be good because I could also clear out the usb wifi I was using,
as all my USB slots were taken up and I was tired of juggling them and
always seemed to have issues with usb hubs (I've had several and none
of them worked very well or at all.)
Here's where things really started going Awry
While I was waiting for it to arrive, I thought I'd look and see ways
to repair the micro-USB connection on the xbox one controller. I found
a few people saying they superglued around the edges of it and that
held the port in place. I tried that but overdid it and plugged up the
port. I tried forcing a usb in but I guess the superglue coated the connectors and got no connection. It'd certainly be a lot harder to
fix now with the superglue there too.
I'll note right before I got it, I was playing ER and it wouldn't
connect online, saying epic servers were down, which was odd as I
didn't think ER was on Epic, and I was playing through steam. I got
the card right about this time, though timeline is fuzzy. I think I
shut down at this point, and installed the card. First issue I found
upon getting it was it needed a usb header on the motherboard to
connect to for bluetooth which seems lazy, and the only header I had
wasn't even a full block, but a single line of 4 pins. What if I didn't
have a free usb header? I didn't see anything about requiring one
when I bought it. I did get it connected, but it was very fiddly and I
kept having to feel and poke at it and without the block it was just
hanging on the pins, and I bumped my video card's fan while doing so.
Upon reboot it came up fine, and my controller connected to bluetooth!
I noticed the wifi had a bar missing though. I never had that before
with the USB wifi. I figured maybe it was the possibly generic drivers windows chose for it. I installed the drivers from the manufacturer,
which turned out to just be intel reference drivers. I fired up ER and
it connected this time, though it took a really long time, like 5
minutes. I quickly noticed that I was getting some serious lag spikes
or stutter, I later timed it and it was semi-random between about 6-16 seconds and lasted around a second or two. Again ER is just too
instantly deadly to put up with those, especially as I'd had no issues
with that for at least a month.
I thought it was the wifi missing a bar, I saw it was connected to the
2.4 network so changed to the 5 and it popped up a message that it was connected 6e, however it only had one bar there. I disabled the wifi,
plugged the usb wifi in, and my bar was back. No difference in spikes,
but I noticed the VC was running a bit hot. I was also wondering if
the wifi card was interfering with airflow to the VC. That was 3rd
strike of suspicion against the wifi card, so took the card out and
started a return of it thinking that was my issue. However the spikes continued. I thought maybe the drivers I'd installed were the issue,
and started a system restore to a point well before I'd installed
them.
After that I got a blue screen on boot with "CRITICAL PROCESS DIED!"
and the oh so idiotic :( on it. After rebooting umpteen times before
it would let me hit F8 to start in safe mode... I still got the
bluescreen. Now I really felt the :( After hours of struggling with
it, I finally got it booting after running dism and sfc off of a
windows 10 boot usb. Finding/figuring out the right commands and
switches was arduous, you'd think that'd be common enough process.
It booted very slowly and gave me a message that the system restore was unsuccessful. So it still had those drivers. Chrome wouldn't start,
so I reinstalled it, then it worked. I began wondering if I should
just reimage my computer, but I wasn't about to give up that easily.
Maybe it wasn't the drivers. I ran file verification on it, but no difference. I know that's never helped in the past, and yeah everyone
always says to reinstall too, but I doubt that'll will help. I thought
to run it in offline mode too. It was noticeably shorter spikes than it
had been but was still there. I did notice the VC wasn't anywhere near
as hot, I was still seeing spikes in the GPU, but couldn't tell if it
was from when I was switching away from ER or the lag spikes themselves (obviously to be investigated more in the future.)
I ordered a usb bluetooth (I swear I had one, but couldn't find it,) a
couple USB 3.0 to 2.0 converter cables as I have 2 3.2 gen 1 headers,
but no cables on my case, and a back panel 4 port usb panel so I have somewhere to plug the usb bluetooth in so I can use my now superglued controller.
Now that my need to vent is done, I'm left with a lot of questions.
Did I damage the VC when I bumped the fan putting the card in? Static
damage from fumbling around with the USB header connection on the
card? Could it be those drivers even though it's still happening
offline? Something weird with ER due to whatever that Epic server
connection was, after all they have always had notoriously bad netcode,
maybe they're trying to add Epic support and screwed something up? But
I don't see anyone reporting this issue. Do the bars really mean
anything and is the connection with the wifi card really worse than the
USB wifi? Was the wifi card really restricting airflow? Lots of
testing yet to do, and still need to try more repairs on my controllers.
On Sun, 18 Jun 2023 10:11:33 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
<dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:
On 6/18/2023 6:45 AM, Justisaur wrote:
Here's where things really started going Awry
While I was waiting for it to arrive, I thought I'd look and see ways
to repair the micro-USB connection on the xbox one controller. I found
a few people saying they superglued around the edges of it and that
held the port in place. I tried that but overdid it and plugged up the
port. I tried forcing a usb in but I guess the superglue coated the
connectors and got no connection. It'd certainly be a lot harder to
fix now with the superglue there too.
Superglue doesn't fix anything. What's happening is the solder joints
holding the USB connector to the circuit board have cracked and the
contacts aren't making constant contact. That's why wiggling the USB
cable sometimes works; you're pushing the contacts back in place. But
between movement, moisture, vibration, and thermal expansion, you'll
lose contact again. Glue can help keep things in place (assuming you
fix it in the right position) but eventually that glue is going to
crack again. The fix is to open the controller's casing and reflow the solder.
(It's a major disadvantage of all micro-sized connectors; there's just
not enough space to properly 'lock them down' to resist the forces it
will face during ordinary handling. And it's not like they really
couldn't spare the space on a controller; they should have used a
type-A connector.)
Did I damage the VC when I bumped the fan putting the card in? Static
damage from fumbling around with the USB header connection on the
card?
Generally, electrostatic damage is harder to cause than most people
think, and more often results in non-functionality than intermittent
failure. Even with RAM, the crashes caused by ESD sparking some memory
cells are usually fairly evident, with immediate crashes the usual
result.
Assuming a hardware problem, I think the first thing I'd check is the obvious: is everything - cards, power connectors, etc - correctly
seated? Unplug everything and reinsert.
After that? Again, assuming hardware is the fault, my eyes look first
to the hard-drive; you'd be surprised how many unexplainable faults,
slowness and problems can be caused by a failing drive (SSD or
mechanical, it doesn't matter). After that, I'd give the PSU a glance;
bad voltages make chips unhappy.
But odds are higher it's a software issue; some new package installed
- purposefully or behind your back by some updater - causing problems.
Fire up Autoruns (I know Windows has built in tools, but Autoruns
remains the superior alternative ;-) and kill all but the most
necessary tasks.
Personally I think your biggest problem is you are keeping way too many
broken controllers when you should have recycled them long since so you
wouldn't waste your time trying to fix them yet again for the umpteenth
time. :P
Somewhat more seriously, why are you even trying to repair them at all?
ALL of this stuff is made by the lowest bidder and NONE of this stuff is
made to be repaired or serviced in any way shape or form! If it stops
working, replace it.
I'm not quite of that attitude, but I LIKE fixing stuff (and I try to
resist pushing stuff to eWaste unless I really have to). And fixing
stuff gives you a better idea how your computer works, turning what
once were serious problems into minor inconveniences. A lot of the
skills learned can be transferred to other areas of your life too.
But I get how some people feel that the way best way forward is to
chuck gear into the trash, and why not? Manufacturers are doing
everything they can to discourage people from extending the lifespan
of their hardware - gluing the chassis shut, not providing service
manuals, putting everything onto an SOC - and buying something new
instead. But with a little patience, and a few tools pretty much
everything can be fixed, if you're willing to put a little effort into
it.
Besides, old hardware is COOL. And old hardware that you breathed life
back into? That's AWESOME.
On 6/18/2023 6:45 AM, Justisaur wrote:
Here's where things really started going Awry
While I was waiting for it to arrive, I thought I'd look and see ways
to repair the micro-USB connection on the xbox one controller. I found
a few people saying they superglued around the edges of it and that
held the port in place. I tried that but overdid it and plugged up the
port. I tried forcing a usb in but I guess the superglue coated the
connectors and got no connection. It'd certainly be a lot harder to
fix now with the superglue there too.
Did I damage the VC when I bumped the fan putting the card in? Static
damage from fumbling around with the USB header connection on the
card?
Personally I think your biggest problem is you are keeping way too many >broken controllers when you should have recycled them long since so you >wouldn't waste your time trying to fix them yet again for the umpteenth
time. :P
Somewhat more seriously, why are you even trying to repair them at all?
ALL of this stuff is made by the lowest bidder and NONE of this stuff is
made to be repaired or serviced in any way shape or form! If it stops >working, replace it.
On Sun, 18 Jun 2023 10:11:33 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
<dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:
On 6/18/2023 6:45 AM, Justisaur wrote:
Here's where things really started going Awry
While I was waiting for it to arrive, I thought I'd look and see ways
to repair the micro-USB connection on the xbox one controller. I found
a few people saying they superglued around the edges of it and that
held the port in place. I tried that but overdid it and plugged up the
port. I tried forcing a usb in but I guess the superglue coated the
connectors and got no connection. It'd certainly be a lot harder to
fix now with the superglue there too.
Superglue doesn't fix anything. What's happening is the solder joints holding the USB connector to the circuit board have cracked and the
contacts aren't making constant contact. That's why wiggling the USB
cable sometimes works; you're pushing the contacts back in place. But between movement, moisture, vibration, and thermal expansion, you'll
lose contact again. Glue can help keep things in place (assuming you
fix it in the right position) but eventually that glue is going to
crack again. The fix is to open the controller's casing and reflow the solder.
(It's a major disadvantage of all micro-sized connectors; there's just
not enough space to properly 'lock them down' to resist the forces it
will face during ordinary handling. And it's not like they really
couldn't spare the space on a controller; they should have used a
type-A connector.)
Did I damage the VC when I bumped the fan putting the card in? Static
damage from fumbling around with the USB header connection on the
card?
But odds are higher it's a software issue; some new package installed
- purposefully or behind your back by some updater - causing problems.
Fire up Autoruns (I know Windows has built in tools, but Autoruns
remains the superior alternative ;-) and kill all but the most
necessary tasks.
On 6/18/2023 6:45 AM, Justisaur wrote:
Here I go again. It all started out simply. My fairly expensive xbox
one controller I got, I think last September as a gift, started having some drift in the left analog stick. Why is it ever since the switch
all the controllers seemed to start having drift problems? I still
have an old xbox 360 controller that I must've used for something like
4 years, and it wasn't drift that killed it's use, it was the right top bumper. I still have it and a number of other controllers with
problems, but that's my oldest by far. I had intended to try to fix it
at one point, but eventually got used to the newer controllers and like them better now.
So with my newest one the drift was causing me to run forward after leaving the stick alone for a few seconds, which in ER means such
things as running off of cliffs or other precarious gravitiy situations
or into monsters and dying far more than I would otherwise. That's probably been going on for close to a month, and getting worse. I
tried a number of easier fixes that didn't require opening it, as I remember I had problems getting into my last xbox one controller and reassembling it and didn't want to mess with it. I tried alcohol,
tapping on the bottom, blowing canned air into the gap so far. Each
time it worked for several minutes then started up again with a
vengeance. I finally gave up on it and started digging out the old controllers. As well as trying to play with keyboard and mouse,
however the controls for that in ER are if possible even worse than previous entries, even with reassigning what I can and setting up
buttons on the mouse.
So controllers. I brought out my last xbox one controller and hooked it up, it had micro usb and of course it was loose. So I would lose connection off and on if I couldn't hold it perfectly still. I got fed
up with that after a couple days. I dug out my next oldest, a wired
xbox 360 one, the wire was pretty kinked up, and I thought maybe I put
it away because of some short in the wire, but no, after using it a bit
it was the d-pad. It was extremely imprecise and I'd end up changing spells, items, and weapons by accident when I went to change one it
would often cyle through more than one and ones adjacent, which slowed
me down enough fumbling with them that I'd die again. I don't think
that one was really so much wear as it was just badly made, I'm not
sure though. I seem to remember that one which was newer than my
oldest had problems from the start. So I pulled out the oldest that I thought had a bumper problem, that came with a puck, so I plugged it in and connected fine, and I used it for a couple days with no issues, The sticks were much looser and less precise than the xbox one controller,
but it was working well enough. Then at last the right top bumper
stopped working, completely dead. I thought it was odd it had been working.
I thought I'd try the 'one' with the bad port wirelessly again, I
remember I couldn't get it to work even buying another puck previously, but thought I'd give it a try. No luck, but I noticed that my work
laptop picked it up on bluetooth?! I don't remember that being an
option previously. I apparently didn't have bluetooth on my gaming desktop, so I ordered a PCI card with wifi 6e and bluetooth. I figured that'd be good because I could also clear out the usb wifi I was using,
as all my USB slots were taken up and I was tired of juggling them and always seemed to have issues with usb hubs (I've had several and none
of them worked very well or at all.)
Here's where things really started going Awry
While I was waiting for it to arrive, I thought I'd look and see ways
to repair the micro-USB connection on the xbox one controller. I found
a few people saying they superglued around the edges of it and that
held the port in place. I tried that but overdid it and plugged up the port. I tried forcing a usb in but I guess the superglue coated the connectors and got no connection. It'd certainly be a lot harder to
fix now with the superglue there too.
I'll note right before I got it, I was playing ER and it wouldn't
connect online, saying epic servers were down, which was odd as I
didn't think ER was on Epic, and I was playing through steam. I got
the card right about this time, though timeline is fuzzy. I think I
shut down at this point, and installed the card. First issue I found
upon getting it was it needed a usb header on the motherboard to
connect to for bluetooth which seems lazy, and the only header I had wasn't even a full block, but a single line of 4 pins. What if I didn't have a free usb header? I didn't see anything about requiring one
when I bought it. I did get it connected, but it was very fiddly and I kept having to feel and poke at it and without the block it was just hanging on the pins, and I bumped my video card's fan while doing so.
Upon reboot it came up fine, and my controller connected to bluetooth!
I noticed the wifi had a bar missing though. I never had that before
with the USB wifi. I figured maybe it was the possibly generic drivers windows chose for it. I installed the drivers from the manufacturer,
which turned out to just be intel reference drivers. I fired up ER and
it connected this time, though it took a really long time, like 5
minutes. I quickly noticed that I was getting some serious lag spikes
or stutter, I later timed it and it was semi-random between about 6-16 seconds and lasted around a second or two. Again ER is just too
instantly deadly to put up with those, especially as I'd had no issues with that for at least a month.
I thought it was the wifi missing a bar, I saw it was connected to the
2.4 network so changed to the 5 and it popped up a message that it was connected 6e, however it only had one bar there. I disabled the wifi, plugged the usb wifi in, and my bar was back. No difference in spikes,
but I noticed the VC was running a bit hot. I was also wondering if
the wifi card was interfering with airflow to the VC. That was 3rd
strike of suspicion against the wifi card, so took the card out and started a return of it thinking that was my issue. However the spikes continued. I thought maybe the drivers I'd installed were the issue,
and started a system restore to a point well before I'd installed
them.
After that I got a blue screen on boot with "CRITICAL PROCESS DIED!"
and the oh so idiotic :( on it. After rebooting umpteen times before
it would let me hit F8 to start in safe mode... I still got the bluescreen. Now I really felt the :( After hours of struggling with
it, I finally got it booting after running dism and sfc off of a
windows 10 boot usb. Finding/figuring out the right commands and
switches was arduous, you'd think that'd be common enough process.
It booted very slowly and gave me a message that the system restore was unsuccessful. So it still had those drivers. Chrome wouldn't start,
so I reinstalled it, then it worked. I began wondering if I should
just reimage my computer, but I wasn't about to give up that easily.
Maybe it wasn't the drivers. I ran file verification on it, but no difference. I know that's never helped in the past, and yeah everyone always says to reinstall too, but I doubt that'll will help. I thought
to run it in offline mode too. It was noticeably shorter spikes than it had been but was still there. I did notice the VC wasn't anywhere near
as hot, I was still seeing spikes in the GPU, but couldn't tell if it
was from when I was switching away from ER or the lag spikes themselves (obviously to be investigated more in the future.)
I ordered a usb bluetooth (I swear I had one, but couldn't find it,) a couple USB 3.0 to 2.0 converter cables as I have 2 3.2 gen 1 headers,
but no cables on my case, and a back panel 4 port usb panel so I have somewhere to plug the usb bluetooth in so I can use my now superglued controller.
Now that my need to vent is done, I'm left with a lot of questions.
Did I damage the VC when I bumped the fan putting the card in? Static damage from fumbling around with the USB header connection on the
card? Could it be those drivers even though it's still happening
offline? Something weird with ER due to whatever that Epic server connection was, after all they have always had notoriously bad netcode, maybe they're trying to add Epic support and screwed something up? But
I don't see anyone reporting this issue. Do the bars really mean
anything and is the connection with the wifi card really worse than the USB wifi? Was the wifi card really restricting airflow? Lots of
testing yet to do, and still need to try more repairs on my controllers.
Personally I think your biggest problem is you are keeping way too many broken controllers when you should have recycled them long since so you wouldn't waste your time trying to fix them yet again for the umpteenth time. :P
Somewhat more seriously, why are you even trying to repair them at all?
ALL of this stuff is made by the lowest bidder and NONE of this stuff is made to be repaired or serviced in any way shape or form! If it stops working, replace it.
I really hate the micro-usb connectors, both the connectors and the ports tend to get bent or cracked and have intermittent connection. I have
trouble with the firewire as well, but it's nowhere near as bad, and the USB-C
so far seem to be very solid in comparison to either.
On 18/06/2023 23:11, Justisaur wrote:
I really hate the micro-usb connectors, both the connectors and the ports tend to get bent or cracked and have intermittent connection. I have trouble with the firewire as well, but it's nowhere near as bad, and the USB-CThe problem I've found with the USB-C connector on my phone is that it's really prone to picking up fluff so every few months I have to use my improvised cocktail stick 'tool' to give it a good clean.
so far seem to be very solid in comparison to either.
My better half's kindle, nope that just broke and I did think about
trying to fix it until I saw how difficult it is to take apart.
But I get how some people feel that the way best way forward is to
chuck gear into the trash, and why not? Manufacturers are doing
everything they can to discourage people from extending the lifespan
of their hardware - gluing the chassis shut, not providing service
manuals, putting everything onto an SOC - and buying something new
instead. But with a little patience, and a few tools pretty much
everything can be fixed, if you're willing to put a little effort into
it.
On Wednesday, June 21, 2023 at 1:02:49 AM UTC-7, JAB wrote:
On 18/06/2023 23:11, Justisaur wrote:
I really hate the micro-usb connectors, both the connectors and the ports >>> tend to get bent or cracked and have intermittent connection. I haveThe problem I've found with the USB-C connector on my phone is that it's
trouble with the firewire as well, but it's nowhere near as bad, and the USB-C
so far seem to be very solid in comparison to either.
really prone to picking up fluff so every few months I have to use my
improvised cocktail stick 'tool' to give it a good clean.
My better half's kindle, nope that just broke and I did think about
trying to fix it until I saw how difficult it is to take apart.
Tablets/Phones have been insanely difficult in at least the last 5 years, probably much longer, but that's the last time I tried to do anything with them
ended up breaking the screen just getting it off with a samsung phone.
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