Two USB ports suddenly stopped working?

A friend of mine has a laptop "Dell XPS" that’s about two years old—running Windows 7—and out of nowhere, two of the USB ports just quit on her. Luckily, the third one seems to be holding up fine.
I seem to recall running into a nearly identical situation maybe three or four years ago. Back then, someone on this forum gave me some specific steps—I think I had to dive into the Control Panel, toggle a few settings here and there, and once I was done, the ports started working again.
Unfortunately, I didn't bother writing down the exact process at the time.
Does anyone happen to remember how to fix this?

Maybe check the hardware manager to see what's going on there.
Right-click on My Computer.
Go to Manage.
Then, from the tree view on the left, select Device manager.
You should see a whole section for Universal serial bus controllers under the list.
Just take a look at each device and its status.

Alright, before I head over to a friend's place, I wanted to see if I could figure out how to check this on My Computer myself.
I went ahead and opened my Device manager, and this is what popped up (see the image below).
Now, where exactly are those three USB ports located? There's just a massive list of things here...

You're going to have to figure that out on your own, I guess. The first step would be checking each individual device to see if they show the status "This device is working properly." You can do that by right-clicking on the device and selecting Properties.

So, I was over at a friend's place just now and pulled up the Device manager, and this popped up on my screen.
Under Universal Serial Bus controllers, I went through every single entry, and everything seems to be reporting as working perfectly fine.
The only thing that’s bothering me is those yellow exclamation marks sitting under Other devices —I can't help but wonder if that might be where the actual issue is hiding.

Well, you can see that among the devices flagged with yellow exclamation points—which basically means something is wrong with them—there's a USB controller, which is most likely the culprit here. Usually, those yellow icons mean a driver is missing, though they can point to other issues too.

There are also a ton of exclamation marks for other devices, almost as if someone did a rushed Windows installation and just walked away before finishing the job. In my opinion, the first step should be downloading all those missing drivers.

It looks like there isn't an official site for Windows 7 drivers anymore; your only real option is searching by Hardware ID. I'll link a discussion from an American forum—moderators, please delete this if it's against the rules:

Look, Mom, just install Windows 10 and everything will be perfectly fine. 🥱