I was helping my mate format his computer this afternoon and both my computer and his were sharing the same monitor keyboard and mouse (ie. I was swapping them between pcs)
Now my computer doesn’t recognise the keyboard and mouse at all.  They’re both on PS/2.  The keyboard’s lights come on but nothing works, even during boot up.  The mouse never comes on.  The mouse does work when using it in USB tho.

Question:  Have I potentially fried my PS/2 ports by plugging and unplugging while the computer was on?

If not what can I try doing?

[quote author=“Mighty Matt”]I was helping my mate format his computer this afternoon and both my computer and his were sharing the same monitor keyboard and mouse (ie. I was swapping them between pcs)
Now my computer doesn’t recognise the keyboard and mouse at all.  They’re both on PS/2.  The keyboard’s lights come on but nothing works, even during boot up.  The mouse never comes on.  The mouse does work when using it in USB tho.

Question:  Have I potentially fried my PS/2 ports by plugging and unplugging while the computer was on?

If not what can I try doing?

just beat the computer couple times ... maybe thatll do it :mrgreen:

I swap back & forth like that. I’ve never heard of a mouse or keyboard frying because it was plugged or unplugged.  If the mouse works in USB mode then it’s OK.

Did you check to make sure the pins are streight in the PS2 connectors? Did you plug both in, then reboot the computer? I’ve seen a computer ignore the mouse or keypad because it gets confused about whether there’s anything on the PS2 port. A reboot fixes it.

Well I’d checked that keyboard and mouse worked in other computers so I was sure it was mine playing up.  I’d obvously tried rebooting, several times.  I’d even uninstalled my mouse and keyboard drivers to try and force windows to see them, to no avail.

In despiration I went to the shuttle site and they seemed to suggest that a CMOS reboot was a good cure-all.  And true to form it worked

Now I’m interested to know what a CMOS boot is… can you please explain that?

I think removal of the CMOS battery to reset the BIOS

[quote author=“babahi”]Now I’m interested to know what a CMOS boot is… can you please explain that?

Hello there mate ..

CMOS or Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor is a CHIP that stores the settings you make with your bios configuration program. All the settings you input the BIOS have to be stored in the CMOS before you can run them.

CMOS boot basically would involve resetting your CMOS settings by removing and re inserting the ‘button’ batt on the motherboard.

Cheers.