I recently purchased a G72-250US and found out too late that none of the three USB ports work. I have tried three different devices - a mechanical keyboard, a Razer mouse, and a SanDisk thumb drive. Of the three, the thumb drive is the only one which receives enough power for its LED to remain on, but none of the devices are recognized by Windows, even as 'unknown' devices.
I've gone through every step I could find or think of to correct any possible sources of problems that could be created by software - uninstalling USB drivers, changing power settings, manually adding data to the Windows registry - and nothing has worked. I have not been able to find any options in the BIOS regarding the USB ports. I have also tried to use 'refresh' in the HP Support Assistant's Health Analysis tool, but the process always fails at 'Gathering Information'.
This has led me to believe that there is a hardware issue, but I'm not sure what the nature of this issue could be. If the ports were just dead, why would the thumb drive be getting any power at all? The only thing I can think of is that there is an issue related to the battery. Per another thread on this topic, I unplugged the laptop and took out the battery and left it like that overnight, but this did not solve the problem. I then ran the Battery Check from the Support Assistant, and it very quickly indicated a failure.
Is it possible that a bad battery is causing the USB ports to not provide enough power to my devices? I previously owned a Compaq CQ42 whose battery was so bad it caused an error to pop up every time I turned on or restarted the computer, but this never resulted in any issues aside from having to keep it plugged in at all times.