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#11
Martin, good to hear you're making progress :)
As for the system working fine for a long time and then degrading, I would put that down to simple wear, the USB ports are not the greatest ever Electro-Mechanical design, and the constant plugging and unplugging, (especially on a laptop), can cause issues for the connections, there is also the old issue of corrosion of the electrical connections.
The powered hub should sort the power issue as it does not take power from the computer, but only data, all power is supplied directly from the mains supply via a transformer/converter in the mains adaptor.
One option for the desktop would be an add-on pci-USB card - modern devices are available on-line for a few pounds and a suitable USB2 or even USB3 card will normally supply a higher power that the defaults fitted to the motherboard