Question Visiting my brother this weekend because apparently his keyboard and mouse won't work, what to take

[mikeymikec]

I built his PC about this time last year, spec:

7800X3D
32GB DDR5-6000 RAM (IIRC)
ASUS TUF Gaming B650M-Plus Wifi (II?)
USB wired keyboard and keyboard
Win11
Seasonic Focus GX-650 (a second-hand PSU I used to use, only a year old at the time)
Radeon R9 380X 4GB (a second-hand GPU of mine, somewhat older but have you seen the price of graphics cards these days)
He uses the built-in Bluetooth to connect to his speaker, IIRC.

So the PC worked for months then according to him a Windows update came in then the keyboard and mouse wouldn't work. He's had a keyboard problem once before that turned out to be a stuck key on the keyboard, which is somewhat difficult to diagnose when he lives hundreds of miles away and often takes weeks to respond to a question. I've made various suggestions but because of the long time period I can't remember all the conversations we've had.

At some point I sent him a memory stick I prepared with Win11 setup and the drivers he needed and apparently he reinstalled Windows with that, got the drivers installed and it was working for a while until again, allegedly a Windows update nailed the keyboard and mouse.

One other detail is that after each new install of Windows (2 so far) he's inexplicably ended up with dodgy software on it. Some time after the first install, I helped him with a problem via a remote connection we set up (might have been Teamviewer back then, these days I prefer Quick Assist), there was a scammy security product I've never heard of, the second time around I found dodgy search engines in Chrome and maybe Edge too. My brother is an ex-Apple guy and so is a PC newbie. He installed uTorrent on the previous install, on the second install I installed Transmission myself via remote connection just to offset the possibility that he went to some scam website and installed malware posing as a legitimate bittorrent program.

I've got a spare new cordless keyboard and mouse that I can bring, I probably have space for a wired keyboard and mouse too as I'm only going down for the weekend and probably won't try to fit everything into my rucksack. I'll take along my usual software toolkit and my own Win11 installer and my laptop.

Primarily I'm thinking that I don't buy for a minute the idea that a Windows update killed USB HID input device connectivity, but maybe in conjunction with malware I suppose it might have done. I should be able to engage safe mode via Windows setup so it will be interesting to see if the keyboard and mouse work any differently then. It would be nice if System Restore is enabled on the new Windows install but I'm not hopeful, it's like Windows Setup spins a wheel of fortune and SR might get enabled and on a sensible setting, or not.

One other detail is that when he starts the computer and the keyboard and mouse isn't working, the computer reacts if he presses the power button for about a second. According to him it didn't say "shutting down" so I assume it's gone into sleep mode. I've queried on that point but I haven't received an answer yet.

He's got a working Internet connection there that's about as fast as mine is, I think. I'm taking the train so one thing that's definitely not on the cards is to take his computer back with me.

Any other thoughts about what I should take with me?

 

[mikeymikec]

Well, his keyboard and mouse worked fine.

 

[mikeymikec]

The next day (I was there for the weekend) it played up. The full story is that the keyboard and mouse work the whole time, but you can't click on anything and get any useful function (like start a program) when the problem occurs, nor can you shut down / restart the normal way.

I think I've fixed it, and I think the root cause was the driver for the graphics card. When I built it a year ago, I installed the 2023 version of Win11 with the last Win10 driver available. Some time later I think Windows installed 24H2 and auto-installed its own driver which I believe caused a bunch of problems such as Red Dead Redemption 2 claiming that the graphics card didn't have enough VRAM (it reported zero VRAM in the game's graphics settings). Then after my brother wiped the computer and installed 23H2, I think he didn't install the graphics driver and Windows installed its own, basically the same problem again.

Re not being able to click on stuff, I'm not entirely sure when the problem got triggered, sleep mode might do it, starting the game might do it. Sometimes it happened after restarting Windows, but ever since I re-downloaded the last driver from amd.com, no more problems.

I've changed that setting in Windows about auto-installing drivers from Windows Update so hopefully that might stop the problem happening in future (or for all I know MS installs say 25H2 at some point and says "well, I don't like this setting!" and changes it back, re-downloads the borked driver, back to square one).

 

[tcsenter]

Could be the NVIDIA App keyboard shortcuts feature messin with things. Definitely install the latest from NVIDIA.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Well, at least he didn't zap the USB controller with a static charge to the cannabis vaping pen stuck in a USB port! [Don't EVER charge things like that on your computer USB ports. Don't EVER!]

I remember when that happened -- February 2021. A very bad year. But -- thanks to ASUS RMA reliability, and my impatience to acquire spare hardware . . . .What's it been? Four years?