2 laptops losing usb mice

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

We've got two Toshiba laptops running XP Pro that take only usb mice. There's no PS/2 ports on these machines so, when the users requested external mice, I took them a couple of usb mice and called it good. Now, the laptops will periodically "lose" the mice during a period of inactivity. They have to reboot to get the mice to reinitialize. The laptops are not going into hibernation during this period (which I suspected at first). It's not critical, but it is annoying. What's up and what's there to be done?

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Someone clued me in to check the power settings anyway. Maybe a default power saving setting is at fault. I'll check it out and let you know.

 

I know that in XP there is a power saving option that used to turn my ADSL modem off after a certain amount of inactivity.

This was about a year ago, so cant remember where to find it, I think it might of been under the USB Hub Root in the device manager. don't quote me on that though

 

Couple of wrinkles. One, is that Toshiba has it's own propriety power manager in Control Panel and the symptoms are actually that, when it first boots, the mouse is not initialized. The user has to unplug and replug the mouse...then it works throughout the day. Probably not a power saving issue.

 

Tell them to try this

Dont plug the mouse in, boot the laptop, once it has finished booting plug mouse in, should auto detect and just start working

 

Even if that works, why is there a problem? I use my laptop extensively and have never had this problem (although, it is a Dell).

 

Used this once on a machine I could take risks on - maybe you won't be able to, tho'

Delete the USB Root Hub from Device Manager. Reboot, re-install USB devices as normal.

Worked for me, but then I could afford the risk ...HTH

 

Unfortunately, these are machines I can't afford to takes risks on. Thanks though, Gav.

 

Dont know why it's happening, my laptops seem fine (they are Dell too.....I like Dell gear)they are quiet old though, but i would have thought that if an old Dell laptop can handle it then a new one should have no problems.......Computers Eh!

Only thing i could sugest is bak up the laptop and try Gavs suggestion.

 

The problem sort of solved itself. Whatever problem the two users were having with their PCs was sorted out and they no longer have to use the laptops. Someone pointed me in the direction of a solution that might have worked.

 

And the beat goes on. The administrator who had loaned one of his laptops to a staff person now wants it reconfigured for him again. This amounts to resetting Outlook to pull in his e-mails from the exchange server. I turned the unit on and was about to work on it when I thought I'd test the mouse.

I powered down the unit, got a usb mouse from storage, the same type that we'd been having problems with, and plugged it in. I powered up the unit. The mouse works fine. I changed Outlook and checked the user profiles to make sure they were set correctly then powered it down. I powered it up again for another check and the mouse still works fine. I took it upstaired and demonstrated it to the administrator...the mouse still works fine. Go figure.

I told him to call me if the problem came up again.

 

"Gates' Legacy" once again, eh Trip ?

 

The real reason we can't access the source code is that it would show all the little bugs Gates has put into his OSes to make life "interesting".

 

More like the reliable word of USB.

 

Glad you got it sorted mate