Computer keyboard and mouse question

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IIRC, the last time I used a PS/2 device (keyboard) on a new computer was when the USB wasn't working. I still have that machine, and USB works fine now. I never found out what happened. Possibly some bit (I have no idea which) accidentally got flipped in non-volatile memory.

Reply to
Mark Lloyd
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I use a wireless trackball with this laptop, and the battery seems to last a few months.

Reply to
Mark Lloyd
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in 1998 I didn't think that "Y2K compatible" would ever mean it's old.

BTW, that MB has an AGP slot (never used), once something found only on the newest systems.

Reply to
Mark Lloyd

No, can't blame Trump for that. He doesn't even use a computer, which tells you a lot about him, how open to learning, to adopting new and best practices, etc. Too bad he learned how to use that damn phone to send tweets.

Reply to
trader_4

For a while I thought that USB ports did't work until after Windows started, but PS-2 ports and the larger round ports that preceded them worked before Windows loaded. As soon as the BIOS ran.

Now I think I'm wrong, but was there ever some truth to this?

Reply to
micky

I dropped a smartphone** and after that the splash screen logo etc. was replaced by a plain green screen with a big totally red and a big totally orange rectangle.

Everything else worked. It's still like that years later. Did I knock a bit out of place?

**A small huawei about 7 years old fwiw
Reply to
micky

Since you can boot from a USB drive, I'd say the answer is a definite no.

Reply to
trader_4

So what is the difference between mini-DIN and PS/2?

Reply to
micky

Could you always boot from a USB drive? My BIOS didn't have that option.

Reply to
micky

It works if the BIOS supports it. That was certainly not forever. The original machines with onboard USB 1 would support a mouse before the drivers loaded but booting a USB drive came about the time of USB 2. With Windows 98SE, you can use a mouse with no problem but you need the driver to run a storage device. There may have been an update that picked that up but it is not on my Latitude lap top.

Reply to
gfretwell

PSD2 uses one of the variations of MiniDIN. S-Vid uses another variation

Reply to
Clare Snyder

Most oftodays computers no longer use a "bios"

Reply to
Clare Snyder

That has still become the buzz word for the firmware that turns a bunch of random chips into a computer.

Reply to
gfretwell

I am thinking the first version of either win 95 or 98 had computers with the USB port,but it would not work. Then there was an update that would load a driver for the USB port.

Could be that win 95B was the first one that even used the usb.

Been a long time, so could be way off.

Reply to
Ralph Mowery

If not, what takes the place of the BIOS ? Maybe something like it by a different name ? The Microsoft type computers I know of need something in the hardware/firmware to tell the processor how to start up the hard drive to load an operating system of some sort and where the video and key board/mouse is.

Maybe something like the Chrome Book does not use it as such.

Reply to
Ralph Mowery

I use UEFI on my latest PC, although the MB supports legacy BIOS too. UEFI has advantages. But AFAIK I haven't used them.

Reply to
Vic Smith

They all need some kind of firmware to match each chip set to the instruction set and to establish the environment. This probably traces it back to the IBM 360 system where there was a vast difference in the hardware under the covers of the various models but they all ran the same instruction set because of the firmware loaded. At that time it was called microcode but it had the same function. In fact the ones with reloadable code could actually emulate other types of computer.

Reply to
gfretwell

He may be referring to UEFI, which is the modernized version of a BIOS, but it's still referred to as a BIOS by the industry and it performs the same function.

Reply to
trader_4

PC makers have slowly been replacing BIOS with the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). It is basically a "low level operating system"

Reply to
Clare Snyder

"Legacy BIOS" is in "emulation mode"

Reply to
Clare Snyder

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