My father in law is getting on, he has Parkinson’s and early stage dementia and he doesn’t get on very well with new stuff any more. His old laptop died from terminal abuse as he mashed the keyboard and it has been sent to laptop paradise.

He is only really comfortable with Office 2000 (well, just Word 2000 actually) so I can’t use Vista or Win 7 pcs to replace his old one.

Luckily I have an old XP laptop with Office 2000 loaded that he can use. I have set it up so it defaults to Word on startup. So far so good.

As the Parkinson’s has impacted on his motor skills I have got him a large buttoned keyboard from RNIB. Now according to the blurb in the box, all I have to do is plug it in to the USB port and it will work. Well it doesn’t, it starts looking for drivers and then tells me to pi$$ off as there aren’t any.

Am I missing something out here? In control panel/keyboard it doesn’t recognise the new device and if i ad new hardware we go through the “where’s your new driver?” routine.

Help: 🙂

You know laptop keyboards are easily replaceable right?

But anyway.. does the keyboard support WinXP explicitly? Try googling for the driver and installing it manually. That ‘looking for drivers’ thing rarely works.

Are you connected to the internet on it at the moment?

If not, connect it, then reconnect the keyboard, it might find the drivers on the internet that way…

OR

It might just be that the machine is set to search for drivers every time a peripheral is plugged in, and that this keyboard is plug and play so doesn’t need any…

Try the following…

Left Click the Start menu
Right Click on “My Computer”
Left Click on “Properties”
Left Click on the “Hardware” tab
Left click on the “driver signing” button

Then try the different options on there and see what happens…

Make sure you’re on service pack 3 for XP.

Look in device manager for yellow (!) symbols – you may need drivers for the USB host.

Are there drivers available on the website for the keyboard? Google any model numbers on it perhaps.

Which of the RNIB keyboards is it?

it is the Pelham Large Print Keyboard

Do any other USB devices work?

A keyboard is such a basic input device that should work out of the box, that I would guess (as mentioned above) the the system USB drivers might need updating

Oooh I have started to get a USB Power Surge warning. Never seen one of those before…. recommends disconnection!

Woody, yes the mouse works in the same port.

I think the old laptop is on SP2 btw

Do you have another PC to test the keyboard on? Some old laptops have limited power from the USB but a keyboard shouldn’t need much. Once its plugged in does it show up in the device manager (start/control panel/system/hardware/device manager)? Are you logged in as admin, again shouldn’t matter for a keyboard but worth a go? You could try plugging it in through a powered hub

Answer no 1. It works ok on my win 7 laptop. I’ll have another go on the old one now.

It does not appear in Device Manager on the XP machine except as an unknown device with the warning icon on top.

Assuming it’s not faulty (as nick suggests, it’s a keyboard not a power amp, how much power does it need?!), if it’s drawing too much power for the laptop to supply then a powered USB hub might be your answer here.

Note that if you don’t disconnect it when prompted, Windows might shut down the port to prevent damage. If this happens, you’ll need to delete the USB controller(s) from devman and reboot to re-enable them.

What’s the make and model of laptop, btw?

It is an Acer Travelmate 290