Constant hardware connection/disconnection sound?

For the last few days, my PC has been making this sound every 30 minutes or so. It’s that specific chime you get when hardware connects or disconnects—like when a printer powers on or you plug in a USB drive.

My first thought was that a USB device—maybe the mouse, keyboard, or webcam—was losing its connection, but everything seems perfectly stable. Nothing is actually dropping out or resetting.
The computer isn't on a local network; it's just hardwired to the modem, and I haven't had any internet drops.

I've checked Device Manager to see if anything pops in and out of the list, but I don't see any changes happening.

😕

Is there an easy way to track down what's causing this? Maybe some third-party software, or perhaps Windows keeps a log of peripheral connections somewhere?

Help!
Thanks in advance for any ideas.

I’m dealing with the exact same issue at work—though in my case, it’s a laptop. It turns out we have a hardware failure in the motherboard, specifically within the chip handling the USB controller (I can't quite recall if it was the northbridge or southbridge). Since the repair cost was just too high at the time, we didn't bother fixing it.

For us, that sound pops up in bursts—maybe two or three times within a few seconds, then nothing for five minutes, then once, then nothing again for another thirty minutes or so.

I basically "solved" the problem by just getting rid of the sound itself:
http://www.overclock.net/t/543736/di...een-pc-on-kvms

Found this tiny little utility that sits in the RAM and tracks every single USB port change or usage without breaking a sweat.

As if on cue—the second I downloaded it and got it running—not a single hardware connection or disconnection occurred. ☕

Turns out my PC is being a bit of a smartass. 😉

Frank Martin2 said:I stumbled upon this lightweight little utility that sits in Rome and tracks every single USB port change and usage perfectly.

Forgot the link—hope this helps someone else out. Here it is:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_log_view.html