USB not working after changing CMOS battery

I am troubleshooting a friends 1.5 yr old e-machine. I only know a little, but it's more than him It wouldn't start at all. He had not changed any settings nor installed/downloaded anything. It gave various error messages from serious hardware problems to CMOS errors. I pulled the battery which, I believe, resets the CMOS settings to defaults. I finally narrowed it down. Unplugging the keyboard allowed the machine to start. Plug it back in, and it wouldn't start up. I went out and bought a new USB keyboard (the old one was ps/2). The new keyboard won't work though.

I ran windows update which downloaded and installed 22 critical updates. I used the installer CD that came with the new Belkin keyboard. I, of course, tried all of the USB ports. I checked the device manager which claims all the USB ports are active and working normally. It does not show the USB printer which is also hooked up (which used to work). I checked the USB power consumption which shows 0 for all ports. I have read in other posts to uncheck the box that allows Windows to power down the USB ports when the computer sleeps. I will try that next time I go to his house, but this doesn't seem to be a wake from sleep issue.

The only other thing I've read that might apply is to check the CMOS settings. There is a setting to activate/deactivate USB ports. Maybe when I pulled the battery, the default CMOS setting is to deactivate the USB ports. My problem with that is it seems odd that the default would be to have the USB ports off. Another is that since the keyboard doesn't work, I can't hold the delete key down to get to the CMOS settings!

 

You'll have to use a ps/2 keyboard to get into the BIOS/CMOS setup. Then check the settings for USB and change as needed. Try disabling it if you find it is enabled. Then boot to Windows and follow the instructions for installing/reinstalling your USB printer and keyboard. It may be necessary to delete them from the Device Manager if they are listed there and have yellow errors associated.

 

And, usually default BIOS settings do not enable USB keyboard support.

 

Thanks! I'll try it as soon as I can and let you know.

 

still no go

I went into the bios settings. The only USB setting was "USB Legacy Support ". It was set to "auto ". I changed it to "enable ". There was no change. The device manager still said all the ports were active with no problems, yet they didn't see the USB keyboard or printer.

Does anyone have any other possibilities?

Thanks!

 

Just a wild stab but perhaps if you download the latest drivers for those two devices, it may be possible to get them working again. Even a reinstall with existing drivers might help. They don't seem to be recognized by the system as plugnplay which is unusual these days. Perhaps one of the downloads disabled a necessary service. Review by running services.msc from the Run window. Check and see what's disabled and let's go from there.

I had a major problem reinstalling a printer and it turned out to be that Application Management was disabled. At least I think that, I actually turned on a couple more so never did really pin it down. It had given me so much grief I was just glad to get it fixed and back to my friend.

Good luck

 

OK, I'm out of my depth now. How do I run that and how do I interpret the results?

Thanks!

 

Just click START > RUN > and copy/paste or type services.msc in the window (press enter) and you'll see the list of services now running. To change the present settings, just double click the chosen one and you'll see the small scrollable window that will allow the selections.

 

Ok, but how do I know what should be enabled/disabled? Is there a list somewhere I can look at?

Thanks for all of your help!!

 

Yes, compare your settings to these.