USB connection unstable in Windows 8

[jboss]

When I connect my Z2 to my WIndows 8 laptop through the USB cable the connection is unstable. The laptop recognises the phone and shows it as external harddrive in Windows explorer, but when I open the drive it does not respond. Then after a while it opens a new Windows explorer window with the phone's drive, but again I can not use it.

I've checked that I have the latest driver. And on my desktop PC with Windows 7 I have no problem.

Hope someone can tell me how to solve this.

[Thommo · Accepted solution]

Sounds like your laptop is having a driver signing issue or the usb port is at fault

[jboss]

Thanks for the reply.

 I tried a different USB port, but the result was the same. I'll investigate the driver signing stuff.

[jboss]

I checked the drivers, all USB devices were working ok. I tried disabling the signing check as described in this post:

http://www.howtogeek.com/167723/how-to-disable-driver-signature-verification-on-64-bit-windows-8.1-s...

But I also realised I should see if installing the PC companion helped (usually I don't care about this vendor-provided stuff as long as I can access the storage).

Doing both solved the problem, so it's difficult to say what did it.