USB Devices Not Recognised on a Sony Vaio S Series

Up until today I was loving my Sony S Series until I couldn't get it to recognise my USB Hard Drive (Western Digital Passport). After a fair bit of trial and error, I found out it wasn't just this hard drive, but all of my usb memory sticks were not being recognised.

Update: Initially, I thought this was a hardware issue but a colleague of mine had the same issue on a Dell laptop - I think it's a windows 7 issue and it seems to happen when your laptop comes out of sleep mode. I seem to have resolved the problem by performing the following steps:

1. Open Control Panel > Power Options
2. Then for your current power plan, click on "Change Plan Settings" 
3. Click on "change advanced power settings"
4. USB Settings > USB Selective Suspend Settings > Set "On Battery" and "Plugged in" to DISABLED.

That's it - problem should be solved.