KEYBOARD problems, of all things...

okay so i'm fixing up my old desktop computer since i'm leaving for college soon and i need to leave my familiy with a decent computer. before i had two HDs but i took one out because it was lagging too much and i don't think there was enough memory to handle all that space. so i took it out, inserted an xp cd in to reinstall the os since that was giving me problems. however, as soon as i get to the screen that says "press any key to boot from cd..." my keyboard fails. i'm able to access the BIOS and use the keyboard there (y'know, the up, down, F10, and so forth) but it fails to respond on any other screen, including the safe mode screen. it's a usb keyboard and having three other usb connections, i tried those. the lights on the keyboard don't flash at all, except very briefly on one usb connection. i pulled out an old s2 keyboard and tried it but that doesn't even get a response. any ideas what it could be? do i need to go out and get a whole new keyboard or could it be my usb connections? or maybe a configuration in BIOS? ANYTHING would be greatly appreciated.

 

Don't know about this except, are you sure the keyboard is plugged into the keyboard port?

 

yes, it's plugged into the right port. i've fixed it for now though. i put in one of those s2 adapters for my usb keyboard and got it running there. problem is, i don't know if my usb plug-ins are working right now.

 

I've never used a usb keyboard and I use an adapter on my usb mouse, so I don't know how XP installs with usb keyboards. I seem to remember reading that the usb ports may not work until XP boots up-- not sure about that though.

I'm dual booting XP and Vista and the usb ports work fine in XP but I'm not sure that the front case ports are working in Vista. My usb Epson printer installed easily in Vista though and works fine (although I haven't loaded the Epson software yet). I have always loaded some usb drivers that came with the motherboard after installing XP.

Glad your kb is working now.