Acer Aspire K6-2 USB keyboard/mouse problems and USB questions

[shepherdofchaos]

Trying to fix this system for a friend. The problem specs: occasional loss of the mouse (most likely a bad USB connection which seems to be isolated to port 1 of 4), and occasional system freeze ups. The system freeze up problem was solved rather quickly, after about the second bootup when I noticed the heatsink fan sputtering and not spinning. The problem I'm left with, however, is that I can't get the mouse to work at all, and I can't get the keyboard to work after booting up into W98 normal mode.

The really puzzling aspect is, the keyboard will work to get into the BIOS setup and also into W98 safe mode. It won't work at all (keyboard indicator light doesn't even come on) after booting into W98 normally.

This system only has USB ports for keyboard and mouse. Unfortunately, my friend only gave me the case without the Acer original keyboard and mouse. Could that possibly make a difference? I don't know that much about USB. Have USB protocols changed since their inception? I could see that making a difference, in as much as the USB keyboard and mouse I'm trying to use are very new, and this system came out in 1997-98, the early years of USB.

Could Acer have possibly made the keyboard/mouse proprietary with their system, so that only their stuff would work?

 

[sandorski]

Many of the chipsets used for k6-2 had USB problems(early USB implementations). If you can find out what chipset the mobo uses and/or whether there are any BIOS updates for it, that would be a good path to start with. It really sounds like a Windows driver issue, I'd guess updating the chipset drivers would be your best bet.

If that doesn't work, you'd likely need to get an Add-In USB card.

 

[shepherdofchaos]

Seems to be a drivers issue. I cleaned the harddrive with format c: and installed Win98 SE. About halfway through the hardware detection rebooting dance the mouse magically came alive. So I'm guessing the USB keyboard/mouse I hooked up had inadequate driver support from the default Win98 first edition install. Hopefully, I can give this system back to my friend, have him do a system restore from CD, plug in his original USB mouse/keyboard (avoiding port 1), and everything will be hunky dory