[budzoid]

My company just upgraded to a new computer and I was given the old one. It was a 4 year old ACER tower with WIN98. It had a lot of registry problems and would not run Explorer very good. However, it was fully functional using Firefox & Thunderbird. When I got it home and hooked it up, it would start in safe mode and when I tried to choose regular mode, my keyboard would not work. It ran Himen test and booted up with minimul drivers and displayed an error on the WIN98 page that said my mouse was not properly installed in PS/2 port and I should install it and restart. My computer does not recognize the mouse or keyboard and nothing I do seems to help. Does this sound like a hard disk or motherboard problem? I don't want to spend a lot of money if it is hopeless (I'll just buy a new one). Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Budzoid

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the keyboard and mouse connections may be swapped. if they are swapped, power down the PC, then make the proper connections. do not disconnect/connect ps2 devices with the power on. the ps2 ports should be identified as either keyboard or mouse.

[bdlt]

the keyboard and mouse connections may be swapped. if they are swapped, power down the PC, then make the proper connections. do not disconnect/connect ps2 devices with the power on. the ps2 ports should be identified as either keyboard or mouse.

[Tyger]

If you have a voltmeter the first thing you might want to do is check the CMOS battery, it should be just over 3 volts, it can cause a lot of BIOS problems and it's only about three bucks for a new one. Just go from the top of the battery to any ground point on the machine. If it's good, go into Setup, usually by pressing the del, F1 or F2 key during the memory test, and explore the settings, of course incluce any mouse or keyboard settings.

It sounds like you may need to reformat and reinstall windows, you will need to find the ProductKey to do that. Acers usually kept the full installation files in windows/options/cabs, and you can reinstall using them, if they're there I suggest copying them to the C: drive. Does the machine have more than one hard drive?