After plugging in a memory stick, the laptop can take up to 2 minutes to discover and show up in explorer. I have tried 3 different makes of stick so far, Transcend, Kingston & Corsair. All are USB 2.0 compliant. All work fine in various other boxes. All of them contain nothing but data (MS docs, pdfs, images & text files). No autoruns, clever encryption or utilities. All are eventually discovered and usable.
Laptop is an ASUS X71Q running Windows 7 32-bit Home Premium, 3GB of RAM. (Out of warranty)
Norton Internet Security is installed, however, with it temporarily disabled I still get the delay.
I am not asking about data transfer rates.
There is no problem with USB mice or keyboards.
This happens at any time, not just straight after booting.
There is no "installing device drivers" message.
I have removed or stopped all ASUS bloatware/utilities.
It happens on all USB ports.
USB drivers are from MS (recommended by ASUS) and have been removed/reinstalled.
It makes no difference if it is running on battery or adapter.
It also happens in safe mode.
Memory usage is sat at 1-1.25GB before I plug in the stick and doesn't change after.
Disk cache increases by 6MB when the stick is recognised and drops back down when it's removed.
None of the sticks are readyboost compliant.
Defrag of the HDD has made no difference.
There is no delay when using a Kubuntu LiveCD
defrag C: /a
. How fragmented is your primary disk?