Mouse and Keyboard problems

[Dana]

I have a Dell 8200 laptop running windows xp.....I reformatted about a month ago and went from xp professional to xp home.....about a week ago the keyboard and mouse started acting up....the keyboard will not respond at times and when I use the mouse to try and click on the start button it just flashes for a second and will not come up......same goes for right clicking.....and when I click on a icon to start a program all the comes up is the properties box....I ran a few spyware programs and found some things and got rid of them ...but it continued to do the same thing....so I reformatted thinking that would fix it ...but nooooo it is still doing it and I don't know why...can someone help me please?

[Kiel]

I have a Dell 8200 laptop running windows xp.....I reformatted about a month ago and went from xp professional to xp home.....about a week ago the keyboard and mouse started acting up....the keyboard will not respond at times and when I use the mouse to try and click on the start button it just flashes for a second and will not come up......same goes for right clicking.....and when I click on a icon to start a program all the comes up is the properties box....I ran a few spyware programs and found some things and got rid of them ...but it continued to do the same thing....so I reformatted thinking that would fix it ...but nooooo it is still doing it and I don't know why...can someone help me please?

It sounds like your mouse is right-clicking. Check the device's by right clicking My Computer, click Properties, and check the Device Manager tab. Click the Keyboard and the Mouse selections. Tell us what it says there.

[belama]

If it would do a right click there should be the context menu appearing. Is this menu appearing or not? Also, what else bizarre does it do? It might not be your mouse/keyboard...

[Dana]

Thanks you guys for replying, I checked everything over and over to make sure everything was set right......it came to my attention that Laptops were not meant to run XP home but XP professional and when I reformatted I put XP Home on it unstead of putting XP Professional back on it .......so I am going to reformat it again and use XP Professional again......we will see if this solves the problem and if not "I'll Be Back" lol :D

[belama]

Laptops do work with Win XP Home. Many of them come with this operating system so did mine. And it worked as well as XP Pro when I had it installed. The biggest difference between Home and Pro is that Pro has extra Admin option like some security and some services like ISS.

Windows XP Home should work well on your laptop. If the problem persists after re installation, the problem would possibly be your keyboard/mouse.

BTW, is it a mouse or touch pad?

[Earl Mardle]

My problem is similar except that since installing SP2 my Logitech keyboard hangs in Ctrl locked down mode so that hitting any key evokes the Ctrl+(that key) response.

I'm using a USB Mouse and PS2 keyboar with USB adapter, both plugged into a USB hub.

The temporary cure appears to be unplug the keyboard.
Open device manager and uninstall the keyboard driver.
Reboot.
It reinstalls the Logitech driver and asks to reboot again.
Do so
THEN plug in the keyboard.

Takes 5 minutes and fixes the problemfor about 36 hours. At which point you have to do it all again.

But this is only since SP2, until then it was all huky dory.

BTW, this is on a laptop and the native keyboard alsways works, no problem.

Similar problem also occurs on the desktop, again after SP2 install.

[kensobel]

It sounds like your mouse is right-clicking. Check the device's by right clicking My Computer, click Properties, and check the Device Manager tab. Click the Keyboard and the Mouse selections. Tell us what it says there.

that is what i first thought, but right click on START button should bring up a menu, not just blink and do nothing.

i am having a keyboard problem myself - i will post a new thread.

[kensobel]

All of a sudden my laptop keyboard stopped working properly. You have to hold the key down for 2 seconds before it will work. At first I thought that it was a bad driver, but the file has not been modified since I got the computer, according to the date shown in Explorer. I don’t think it is the keyboard hardware, since pressing the key down does make the electrical contact – holding it down longer shouldn’t have any effect. It is driving me crazy (Count the chars, including spaces, and multiply by 3, and you can see how long it took to type this. 676 chars X 3 = 2028/60 = 33.8 mins.) and I don’t know what to do to fix it – HELP!!!
Thank you,
Ken