Power outages aren’t good things for any computer. When a branch fell on the power line behind my house, I heard a loud explosion. Then I heard all the UPS systems in the office start bleeting their warnings. Power was out, time to shutdown the computers and wait.
My “test” PC is also my gaming PC and I use it a lot. It’s a Dell something-something (I don’t pay attention to model numbers). I purchased the system in 2007. It’s a monster, too: big tower with four optical drive bays, four hard drive bays, and lots of expansion. I called it Monster X, shown dead in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Okay, so the Dell is an XPS system, something that they probably inherited from Alienware.
When the power came back on, I fired up the UPS systems and started each computer. The Mac came on just fine. And so did Monster X — apparently. It started up and everything was peachy, except for the Microsoft wireless mouse. For some reason, the computer didn’t find or obey the mouse.
You can use a Windows computer without a mouse, but it’s a royal pain. Forget about killing a task by using the Task Manager, but other options are available for some basic troubleshooting. For example, I was able to open the Device Manager window (which is described in my Troubleshooting All-In-One For Dummies book), and I attempted to re-install the mouse device driver.
I say “attempt to re-install” because it took the computer thirty minutes. Nothing So my next step was to manually remove the wireless USB dongle and stick it back into the USB port. Still nothing.
Then I tried to uninstall the mouse driver. Again, that operation took forever. It wouldn’t complete! Out of frustration, I restarted the computer.
When the logon screen appeared, I discovered that not only the mouse had failed but the keyboard was gone, too.
I’ve had keyboard issues on that computer before. (Thinking back, those were probably portents of this impending doom.) Eventually, after unplugging and re-plugging the keyboard into the USB jack, it was recognized. The mouse, not so.
Once again, I restarted the computer.
Keyboard failure.
Not only was the computer not recognizing the keyboard, it had suddenly stopped recognizing any input device. Long story short (which is kind of too late): The computer’s USB I/O system had failed. Both the keyboard and mouse are fine, but internally the USB electronics are foobar.
According to my records, Monster X is seven years old. That’s a good run for a PC, especially a workhorse I used over and over again. I’ll be able to salvage some parts from Monster X and use them in the new PC I ordered. Its video card is less than a year old, and of course I’ll move over the main hard drive so that I can copy my files. I have a backup, but it’s easier to restore directly from the hard drive.
Next week: I’ll detail the ordeal of moving to a new computer and whether or not you can copy over programs, simply re-install them, or are forced to buy them all anew.
