I've got a personal Surface Pro 3 that I like very much. It's worked great for years and I haven't had any issues with it. However, yesterday while installing a 3rd party USB device something got goofed around with the drivers and I ended up in this state.

That "banged out" device in my Device Manager is the root Universal Serial Bus (USB) Controller for the Surface. That means everything USB didn't work since everything USB hangs off that root device node. I know it's an Intel USB 3.0 xHCI Host Controller but I didn't want to go installing random Intel Drivers. I just wanted the Surface back the way it was, working, with the standard drivers.

I tried the usual stuff like Uninstalling the Device and rebooting, hoping Windows would heal it but it didn't work. Because the main USB device was dead that meant my Surface Type Keyboard didn't work, my mouse didn't work, nothing. I had to do everything with the touchscreen.

After a little poking around on Microsoft Support websites, a friend turned me onto the "Surface Tools for IT." These are the tools that IT Departments use when they are rolling out a bunch of Surfaces to an organization and they are regularly updated. In fact, these were updated just yesterday!

There are a number of utilities you can check out but the most useful is the Surface Diagnostic Toolkit. It checks hardware and software versions and found a number of little drivers things wrong...and fixed them. It reset my USB Controller and put in the right driver and I'm back in business.

This util was useful enough to me that I wish it had been installed by default on the Surface and plugged into the built-in Windows Troubleshooting feature.

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