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Upgraded W95 to W98 serial mouse problem


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#1
janaas

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I am working on an old PC that my brother is using for his children. I recommended that he use it as a boat anchor, but we decided to try to squeeze another year or two out of it.

The PC is about 10 years old and was handed down from a couple other people. It originally ran Windows 95 and was working fine until last month. For whatever reason the system became unusable to the point where Windows would not even start up. I could get to SAFE MODE but did not have any of the original Windows 95 installation software or device drivers. After many unsuccessful attempts at getting W95 to work, I decided to upgrade to W98. I was skeptical at first because of the age of the CPU. The good news is that the upgrade or actually the new install of W98 worked beautifully. I was able to reformat the hard drive and install W98 and everything looks OK so far except for the fact that I have lost the use of the mouse. The PC does not have USB ports and in fact the only way to attach the mouse is via the good old 9-pin serial COM1 port. The mouse is made by Zoltrix.

I did a lot of searching on the Internet and got a few ideas but none of them have helped so far. I tried to reinstall the mouse driver and disable and re-enable the serial ports.

The keyboard controls work fine. The mouse works neither in normal or safe mode.


:tazz: Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Edited by janaas, 01 May 2005 - 08:46 AM.

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#2
gerryf

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In device manager (tricky to get to without a mouse, but you seem like you are managing), is there a yellow! on the serial ports?

You could install the dos mouse driver in the autoexec or config.sys

Add the following to your AUTOEXEC.BAT, found in the root directory
LH C:\WINDOWS\MOUSE.COM

Note: LH may not load if you don't have a memory manager loading, so omit the LH if it fails.

or, in CONFIG.SYS add
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\MOUSE.SYS
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#3
janaas

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Thank you for the suggestions. Reminds me of a DOS world we lived in a long, long time ago. I actually had further problems with the PC in question so I decided to take the hard drives from it and install them on another old PC that I have. It is a couple of years newer than the original and does have a mouse port (non-serial). I now have a ribbon cable problem, I think. I will continue to work with this second PC. If I need further assistance, I will create a new thread.

Thanks again for the information about installing the mouse driver manually. I may still have to use that method on the second PC.
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