2 USB hard drives and a printer

I've been have this problem for over 6 months and when I think I get if working right it stops. I have two USB harddrives and a Dell printer. The first time I had problems was when I had my USB Flash drive and printer plug in and it didn't find the Flash Drive. Dell sent a tech out and replace the motherboard, and he told me to hook the dell printer up to another computer (which sucked). The second time was right after christmas, I tried to use one of my harddrives, I said it was unrecognizeable. I thought that it was driver issues so I reformated (which I hadn't done in a while). It didn't fix it. I chatted with dell and they did a remote session two weekends ago, and told me that I need to hook both harddrives and printer to my powered hub. They also told me that I had 1.0 USB ports (which was a lie) and that they wouldn't support all three devices. Last week I tried to back-up my computer and to one of the drives. It lasted about ten minutes and then dissapeared from "My Computer". So now there trying to get me to do another remote connection. Does this make sense?