Christian Gaming Community

I do part-time consulting, fancy way of saying I'm a part-time computer and gaming console fix-it guy. I've got a system at my house now that I must share with ya'll..

All these new and fancy rigs these days ship completely without PS/2 ports. You know, those round plugs designated for (OLD) mice and keyboards.

Funny thing.

This system has been infected with spyware and malware, owner brought it to me with claims that browser will open on it's own and go wherever it wants.

Wish I could see that.

As it is, all I can do is stare at the login screen. Seems the quickest way for a would-be harm-do'er to render your machine completely useless is corrupt the USB driver / system. USB is totally dead in XP. Not dead in BIOS, not dead in the partitioned utility application.

But isn't that just clever? I mean.. I can't boot with Xp media (this rig came with XP MCE), because none of it supports the SATA hardware and "current-day" gadgetry. I CAN go fishing, err, download shopping at the systems support site, but, since this is the day of media-less OS's there is no quick and easy way to get into a Windows install to select 'repair'... So effectively, to many, this computer is completely dead and unusable.

Bring back ps/2 I say, lol!!

Have you tried booting into safe mode? Chances are keyboard will work. Use recovery mode from safe mode and restore to an older date. Then use antivirus and spyware in save mode to remove any unwanted issues. A lot of these programs can not be removed unless in safe mode.

Hope this helps.

Also If there is a way to get you a download I have a repair disc that geek squad uses in house that works wonders.

yea safe mode hangs the system.. That was the 2nd thing I tried Even tried using things like BartPE and other 'preinstalled' environments, problem with those is the same as using a generic XP install disc - They don't support the hardware of these newer systems. Had Dell shipped this customer the XP MCE recovery disc(s), I'd not be in this delima. And while XP MCE is about the ONLY OS I don't own a version of, getting drivers for it from the Manu. that I can F6 add drivers (during the OS CD's startup to get to a recovery console even) is proving quite the challenge.

I'll persevere, mind you, but I just thought that was a really nasty, yet brilliant thing to do, thus my sharing

I mean, even your shady repair guy.. You KNOW there's some rip-off shop out there setting a scheduled task to run a batch file to delete files like that after the customer 'warranty' is expired. If you're a consumer who takes their PC to the shop, man, check for stuff like that (upcoming scheduled tasks). Wicked I tell you, plain wicked.

windows xp had an option to reinstall xp and save all files in the drive. I have done it before. boot from cd and reinstall. If memory serves me right it will ask you if you want to choose that option. Vista dropped that feature and now offers to repair a pc if it will not boot.

Just a thought

another thought

Have you gone into bios and verified usb option is not turned off?

Again, don't have Win XP MCE on hand to try.. I did try booting with my XP Pro SP2 (and even the orig XP disc, both home and pro), none of them work atm because of the lack of SATA driver support natively. Vista will let me boot, go into a command prompt with which I can access the C drive (yeah!!), and there looks as though there is cloned install cd (IE there is an i386 folder), dir a dir usb*.* and about 8 files show up, next step will be loggin' into one of my XP rigs and tracking down where each of those xp usb files belongs, and copying them to their respective locations and hoping maybe that will work.

Silly - You with the thinking - Of course I checked the BIOS Moreso just to make sure somehow that infamous 'usb legacy support' that sometimes prevents keyboards from working wasn't on - though the lack of anything powering up via usb, old or new kinda ruled that out anyway.

Fun times..