Dead USB ports

[Islander Jock]

After suffering numerous problems of keyboard locking up, prgrams crashing not being able to run scandisk etc I decided it was finally time to rebuild my hard disk from scratch. After backing up everything I needed to CD I inserted the supplied installation / recovery disc and at the prompt told the pc to go for it!

Everything with the installation went well, no more nasty little programs running in the background that I couldn'd kill etc but now I have another problem:
On the back of the PC there are 4 USB ports. 2 are dedicated (or labelled anyway) for the mouse and keyboard. The other 2 I use for the speakers and scanner.

What has happened though is that nothing I plug into the USB ports like Scanner or USB flash drive seems to be recognized by the system despite reinstalling the respective drivers several times. I know the devices and cables themselves are fine because they work normally with my new notebook.

The pc is a Pentium II or III with 20 Gb HDD, 128Mb RAM operating under Win98 second edition.

Any clues greatly appreciated.

[Ray Darr]

Try this...Remove the USB controllers from your system through the Control Panel, then allow the hardware wizard to re-install them using these steps:

START > Control Panel > then double click on "System".

Expand the Universal Serial Bus Controller category, and highlight every USB showing. Delete them one by one.

Reboot, and your hardware wizard will re-install the USB drivers (have your Win98 OS CD's handy!).

Remember, MOST changes in win98 require rebooting for them to work.

Good luck, and let us know how it works out.
~Ray Darr

[Islander Jock]

Thanks Ray Darr. I keep deleting the wrong drivers and disabling the mouse and keyboard before I get the others deleted.

[Islander Jock]

Well after much booting, rebooting and reinstalling, I found on the device list that it was saying the scanner was not properly installed or there was a communications problem. But when I tried to remove it from the device list the whole thing locked up.

Decided to bite the bullet again and do another complete format with everything disconnected and voila! Everything works fine.

Now have one very happy, albeit a bit aged pc operating on WIN 98.