System Upgrade - USB Mouse
April 15, 2000

 Our mice refuse to work. No amount of cleaning seems to make any difference. The obvious solution was to get one of those optical mice with a special reflective metal pad. Well, none of the stores around here sell those any more. Instead, they carry the new Microsoft optical mice which don't require any type of pad. Of the 3 available versions, I decided to try a Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical - Here we go again ...

My system has a working USB port and does not have a PS/2 port. So, I follow the instructions and turn on the system, then plug in the mouse and install the software. Unfortunately, I did not run InControl first. (Oh well.)

After re-installing the driver several times, I tried the Microsoft web page. Well, no help there.

The key was to use Start / Settings / Control Panel / System / Device Manager / Microsoft USB Intellimouse Optical / Properties which stated that ntkern.vxd could not load the drivers.

Under Driver / Driver Files Details... There are 5 entries. One of them was in lower case, all the rest were upper case. The strange thing is that Hidusb.sys is listed twice 

C:\WINDOWS\HIDUSB.SYS
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\Hidusb.sys
Well, that was odd. I checked, Hidusb.sys was present in C:\WINDOWS but not in the drivers directory. Hum. Well I copied the existing file to the other directory, re-booted the system, and ... IT WORKED!

When I checked the Driver Files Details... again, all the files were upper case.

I was not able to find how this file is referenced, in particular, why it is referenced twice.

Total time wasted, ~5 hrs. This is definitely not a problem that the average user could fix.

For what its worth, the new mouse seems to work much better than the old ball mouse.

It Quit Working 8-15-00

That's right - the mouse was working fine that morning, but later that day it didn't. The light won't even come on.

I have 2 other USB devices, and they won't work either.

Well, it turns out that the system does have a PS2 mouse port, I just had to find the provided cable and plug it into the mother board. The mouse works perfectly with the PS2 interface, but not with the USB interface.

I checked BIOS and verified that the USB port is still enabled. In Control Panel / System / Device Manager, the USB Root Hub and VIA ... PCI to USB Universal Host Controller seem to both be working (no obvious errors). It uses Interrupt 11. There is no Device Manager / Microsoft USB Intellimouse Optical entry.

As far as I can tell, there is a hardware failure.

usb.PNF was last modified 8/15/00 at 3:22 PM, msmouse.PNF was last modified 8/17/00 at 9:49 AM. Unfortunately, I don't exactly remember which day the usb port failed. Just that it was August (I writing this in February and its still not working). I've made backups so that I can check the deltas if this thing ever works again.

Author: Robert Clemenzi - clemenzi@cpcug.org
URL: http:// cpcug.org / user / clemenzi / technical / Upgrades / USB_Mouse.htm