Not to highjack the thread, but it might work to get a PCI USB card to power one or the other device. I have done this before for two conflicting USB devices. This will obviously not work for a laptop.

What if you plug the tablet into the hub? But, you are more than smart enough to have tried that.

If you have several computers networked together, you can attach the drive to another computer, and share it over the network.

I guess we should all be saving(backing-up) our precious runtimes to CDs or DVDs.

lmk

Probably edited for spelling, grammer, punctuation, or typos.