Bluetooth keyboard works in bios but not in OS

Illtempered

New Member
Specs: Dell m2010 notebook with vista 32bit


So I kept having this annoying popup about a USB device that wasn't recognized, probably the result of a new motherboard being put in recently. I was searching for a fix when somebody suggested I uninstall the USB devices from the USB tree in Device Manager.

I didn't think it would cause problems. After all, my keyboard is wireless bluetooth. Well, I was wrong. After uninstalling devices only from the USB secion of the Device Manager, my keyboard stopped working.

The keyboard works in the bios, and boot screen, but won't work in the OS. The touch-pad did work at first in the OS, when the problem first started, but a tech at dell managed to screw that up. Now nothing on the keyboard works in Windows. They also managed to screw up the usb ports so that not even my wireless mouse would work. The driver window would pop up asking if I wanted to search for drivers, but I had no way to make selections...total lockout from my OS. Somehow, rebooting over and over, trying various things plugged into the USB ports, got the mouse working. So, at least with my mouse, and onscreen keyboard I can limp along.


Dell's brilliant solution is to reformat :/ I have my important files backed up, but with all the tweaking I did to Vista, I really don't want to start over...yet. Does this have the potential to fix my problem? Thanks in advance!

Addendum:

EDIT: Ok problem solved...I guess. I tried to boot from the recovery disk by pushing f8 at startup. I got a menu that didn't have an option to boot from disk, but did have an option to turn off windows verification of drivers. On a whim, I selected it, and wham, keyboard works when vista starts up.

The keyboard still doesn't show in the bluetooth setup, but it works, so ah well. I guess I'll leave well-enough alone for now. At least I have a recovery disk now. Thanks!

*shakes fist at dell and ms*
 
Last edited:
Hi Ill, welcome to NST.
You could try a system restore back to before you started messing with the device manager, but "if it ain't broken........" is not a bad philosophy.
Make a quick decision though whether you wan't your bluetooth stuff back again, because the ability to go back will be time limited by the size of your Vista partition (and the number of points it can maintain in its FIFO queue for system restore)
 
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