75ZT Community

Not mine, but my Niece who is away at Uni. In the last couple of days, the mouse and keyboard won't work in windows. Ipod doesn't charge up either. However the keyboard and mouse do work before windows has properly loaded, for example if you force an improper shutdown and restart. Then the keyboard lets you select whether to start windows normally and so on.

My suspicion is a USB driver problem, but they've apparently tried using system restore and it didn't fix it. It's windows 7. Has anyone seen anything similar? I suspect it needs the driver deleting and re-installing, but how to do this with no mouse or keyboard? I'll ask her to start it in safe mode, and see if they work then when fully booted, and that may help, but I seem to remember in previous versions of windows, that the drivers aren't visible to be deleted, in safe mode.

Comments and suggestions welcome!

If it's the same as XP and they have the disk then you can reload windows without loosing data. the SECOND time it asks if you want to repair windows select yes and it re installs windows but all your files and folders remain

Thanks, Dave. I'm not sure if she has the disks and so on.

I have had similar issues in the past when trying to reload with a wireless mouse and keyboard and have always kept ones with cables and the old style plugs which worked for me, just a thought, or is it a usb keyboard

Is it not possible to download the drivers from the manufacturers site on another computer, put them on a usb stick and see if they load automatically on her pc

Windows 7 loads a minimalist set of generic drivers in safe mode so that should work to the extent that you regain control of mouse and keyboard Duncan.

What I'd think of dong then is a System Restore from within safe mode.

Thanks for the suggestions, all.

They had tried system restore, but it hadn't worked.

It arrived here this evening, and I had a look. I was fortunate, it had legacy ports so I could use the mouse at least in normal mode. Any USB device I tried to add, including memory sticks and other USB keyboards and mice wouldn't install a driver. I tried deleting the existing drivers and it would still fail.

It was set to only search locally for drivers, so I wondered if this wasn't helping, but even when forced to look online it wouldn't load any drivers. The message came back for everything: drivers have failed to install properly.

I did notice they hadn't been allowing windows updates so there were fifty or so outstanding. I thought I'd let them do there stuff before carrying on trying to sort the problem. However, just installing them allowed or actually carried out the reinstallation of the relevant drivers, and everything started to work.

So, all in all, an easy if time consuming fix. Best part of three hours and 250 meg of updates later, and it's all healthy again.

Kids, eh!

I do like a happy ending !