USB Keyboard and Mouse problems with Ultra 4 boards

[dirkoneill]

I've started building my new machine based on the Ultra 4 chipset but i've run into a huge problem, twice. My first board was a KN1 extreme but I returned it due to this problem and the new board is an MSI Neo4 Platnium. With both boards, my usb keyboard and mouse refused to work in windows.

The mouse is an IBM optical and the keyboard is from my apple g3. Both have worked on every computer I have owned and many others which i have worked on. These new boards are the first ones that refuse to work. Now I am left wondering what to do.

Here is what happened with the ECS board. If i had the keyboard and mouse plugged in and startup, 8 out of 10 times the computer would hang on the splash screen. If i unplugged and restarted it would boot up just fine. Now when i was booted into windows, the computer wouldn't recoginze the keyboard or mouse until i plugged and unplugged it about 10 times. Now the interesting part is that i was setting up a dual boot with Ubuntu and Ubuntu had no problems with the input devices as long as i didn't freeze on the splash screen. Anyway i thought it was a bios problem but there were problems flashing the bios and I returned the board.

So yesterday I received the MSI as a replacement. Everything apears fine at startup. The keyboard lights up and so does the mouse but as soon as it gets to windows it turns off. Only this time, now matter how many times i plug it in, it will not be recognized. I haven't gotten far enough to install ubuntu but i bet it works with that.

Here is what I know. The keyboard and mouse work with windows xp on my 3 other machines in the house. They seem to work until windows loads. The MSI board is way more stable then the ECS. So I think it's either a USB 2 issue or an Ultra 4 + windows xp issue. I'm gonna go buy a mouse today but i'm worried that a usb or wireless one won't work so i'm stuck with ps2. This doesn't seem right. This isn't 1998 and I should be able to use usb input devices if want. Has anyone else experienced this problem?

 

[Peter]

My guess is that one of those devices triggers the USB overcurrent protection. Does the arrangement work when you're placing things onto a USB hub? (These are usually less twitchy in OC protection than mainboards.)

 

[dirkoneill]

I don't have a USB hub so I can't test that theory but it sounds pretty good. But would the OC protection only occur in windows? I"m going to buy a Logitech MX 310 mouse today and hook it up to the ps2 port. Hopefully that will let me get my setup going. I wonder if it will work as a USB device.

 

[Peter]

Hardware OC protection usually kicks in when a driver is trying to _use_ the device (as opposed to just _detecting_ it). Windows also has "soft" power protection, reading from the device's PnP data how much power it uses and then calculating whether this power draw is allowable on the port you plugged it into. If Windows thinks it isn't, it'll give you an error message.

 

[dirkoneill]

Is this only on newer motherboards because it works perfectly on my other windows xp machines.

 

[Peter]

No, every USB port is supposed to have a current limiter. The official limit is 500mA; how tightly above that the cutoff point is, now that's up to the hardware designers and how far they trust their traces and power circuits.

 

[dirkoneill]

I don't know if this is it. Something about the different motherboards reactions and then how windows reacts on the older machines compared to the new machines compared to linux working perfectly, makes me think this isn't it. All of those different instances do not make a consistent issue. The only persistent problem exists in the combination nForce Ultra 4 motherboards and windows xp.