Mouse Failure

[dfwskier]

A friend ask me to take a look at his computer because his PS2 mouse
stopped working. We tried a new PS2 mouse. No change.
I figured that the mouse drivers had somehow gotten corrupted, so I
went in to delete the mouse drivers, but there were no drivers
showing. The mouse was not showing as an active hardware device. There
have been no error messages.

I went out and bought a USB mouse, let the computer find the new
hardware (it did), and the USB mouse works fine, but when I put a PS2
adapter on that same mouse it will not work.

As near as I can tell he did not install any new hardware, and the
only updates he might have done are AV and/or XP update related.

He can get his machine to work with the USB mouse so this is not a
critical issue, but from an acedemic standpoint I'm wondering what
happened?

Any ideas?

TIA.

 

[dfwskier]

A friend ask me to take a look at his computer because his PS2 mouse
stopped working. We tried a new PS2 mouse. No change.
I figured that the mouse drivers had somehow gotten corrupted, so I
went in to delete the mouse drivers, but there were no drivers
showing. The mouse was not showing as an active hardware device. There
have been no error messages.

I went out and bought a USB mouse, let the computer find the new
hardware (it did), and the USB mouse works fine, but when I put a PS2
adapter on that same mouse it will not work.

As near as I can tell he did not install any new hardware, and the
only updates he might have done are AV and/or XP update related.

He can get his machine to work with the USB mouse so this is not a
critical issue, but from an acedemic standpoint I'm wondering what
happened?

Any ideas?

TIA.

Oh, one last thing. This is a relatively new machine, so it came with
Service Pack 2 on the machine.

 

[glee]

Check in the BIOS setup, as some have an option to enable or disable PS/2 mouse, and
it may have turned off.

Another possibility is that the PS/2 port has died. This can happen from an
electrical surge, most often happens from unplugging and re-plugging the PS/2 mouse
while the computer is ON. What usually happens is the tiny fuse on the motherboard
behind the PS/2 port will burn out. Unfortunately, it is soldered to the
motherboard, making its replacement not something for a do-it-yourselfer or even for
the average computer tech.

I have seen this occur a few times with a keyboard port, but not yet with a mouse
port.

http://www.computer-engineering.org/ps2protocol/

http://www.classicacorn.freeuk.com/32bit_repairs/ps2_fuse/ps2_fuse.html

 

[frodo]

you can NOT just use a "PS2 Adapter" w/ any old usb mouse; the mouse has
to have been specifically designed to use it, otherwise it will likely fry
the mouse or the port. Typically the mouse will say on the bottom PS2/USB
if it'll work w/ an adapter.

Try a known working mouse, if it fails too then I'd say the port is fried.
You could try it in the other PS2 port (the keyboard), they are the same.
If the keyboard worked but the mouse doesn't then it's the mouse.

 

[dfwskier]

The USB mouse I referred to was a dual mode USB/PS2 mouse which came
with it's own PS2 adapter.