USB ports won't recognize external drives

External drives plugged in to the usb ports are not recognized by the computer. These are mostly large capacity Seagate backup drives but many usb sticks won't read either. Sometimes I can go into the partition manager and see the drive without a drive letter. If I assign one it works until I remove it. Most often it is not there at all. These drives all work fine on a linux laptop. They are all formatted NTFS.

I have gone through the Dell troubleshooting procedures but still no joy.