Controller becoming unresponsive periodically

[Raist]

Stumbled on this problem today when setting up a new Snakebyte PS3 wired controller on my laptop and may have found something that may help some of you guys out. The thing was only $15 at Walmart, so I had to try it... and sure enough it works without having to use MotionJoy or any other modded XB drivers in Win8... but did run into one glitch.

When trying to calibrate the analog joysticks in the Devices and Printers control panel (right click game pad icon, click game controller settings, go to properties for the controller, Settings Tab, and start calibration), it would stop tracking the movement periodically while spinning the left stick. The crosshairs would sometimes just stall for a second here and there. The same thing happened on the Z axis and Rotation phase--one time it didn't even track a button press. It did this on all but ONE USB port--the one with the quick-charge option. 4 USB 3.0 ports on this beast, and the only one it would work properly on was the one that provides quick-charge support, and has a BIOS option to keep that one port powered on even when the system is suspended. It seems this one port sort of plays by it's own rules when it comes to it's power management... which brought me to test something I've run into in the past:

The Windoze Selective Suspend Service may be interfering with the polling of the controller input somehow. Not sure where the responsibility for this glitchiness would fall to... the vendors or Microsoft. But, is a common issue with mouse lockups that shows up on different forums. The work arounds that always come up is to disable the option to power down the inactive USB ports by going into Device Manager, expanding down to each of the USB hubs and going to their Power Management tabs. There is a regedit that can be made under the USB services section to disable the Selective Suspend Service, but in Win8 I don't see one single USB service, so not sure if that can be applied so simply.

Unfortunately, disabling the power save option for each USB entry in Device Manager didn't fix it... had to go one step further. Had to do it for the detected HID entry for the controller as well. Up near the top of the list in Device Manager, expand the Human Interface Devices and check for an entry for your game controller--disable the power save option there. In my case, it was simply listed as a USB Input Device. Note that you will need to do this for each port you routinely plug the controller into. It is possible it may loose the setting after a power down as well, so you may want to double check it if doing this resolves the issue and then it comes back.

Hope it helps some of you guys out. It seemed to be the fix for this controller at least.