Thanks for, um, nothing!

I spent almost 6 hours at work today. Ugh. I managed the get all the last Norton installs done and that’s off my plate. I managed to get all the new PC’s documented and entered into the helpdesk/specs database, and I tried a number of things to get those USB Dual PS/2 adapters but it’s all no dice. Here’s what I know. On every other PC I plug them in to (XP,98, and 2000) the USB controller sees it and loads first a USB Composite Device driver, and then one Human Interface Device driver for each of the two PS/2 ports. That makes total sense. The Sony will load other devices in USB, I tried both a scanner and a CF Card Reader, and they operate fine, but the USB Composite device seems to throw it, and it can’t recognize it, and thusly can’t load the other two drivers.

Now given all of this information, I called Sony support this afternoon. I politely explained the situation to them, explained that, for some reason, their OEM version of XP pro just didn’t seem to be able to load the generic MS driver for USB Composite devices, and asked if there was some sort of hotfix for this, or if they could explain why this wasn’t happening. The response? I can’t quote it exactly but it was something along the lines of “we use a customized version of Windows and if your hardware isn’t compatible, too bad. See if Belkin has a driver for it.” They don’t, the device uses a generic MS driver that, apparently, doesn’t exist in Sony’s OEM version of XP, and they feel no need to fix that.

I guess now I’m going to see if I can return the adapters and pick up USB mice and keyboards for these users and use one per port. Does anyone know whether Sony actually will load those drivers on a Vaio laptop? (I don’t currently have any USB input devices to test with..)

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