I have a belkin USB card in a 6500. Attached to the USB bus I have a Kensington TurboBall and an Adesso Nu•Form Keyboard. Both the keyboard and the turboball are plugged directly into the usb card. The track ball works fine and I almost never have any problems with it. The keyboard however has problems. Most often in the morning when I wake the computer up, the keyboard will not function. The solution is to unplug and reconnect the keyboard. This usually works, but not always, sometimes I must restart the computer. I am running MacOS 9.0.4 and have USB Adapter Card Software 1.4.1.

Anybody have any ideas about a solution?

[Qono]

Weird, eh? I posted above about the same problem w/ the same products. I just bought OS 9 today to upgrade from 8.6, but I guess that's not going to do much, is it? I thought maybe Apple cleared up some USB issues in the new OS, I may as well get a refund for it. I suppose this means that the problem lies in the keyboard/mouse. Kensington and Adesso weren't much help either, were they? I advise everyone to steer clear of these products until some sort of solution is figured out...

Well I'm actually typing this reply on my old ADB keyboard because I can't get my USB one to work. I don't have problems with the kensington turbo ball very often. When I first got it I did once in a while, but with the new USB software it seemd to take care of that. It almost always works. I don't know what's up with this keyboard though. I guess I'll just have to deal with it until I get a machine with "real" USB.

To those of you that have machines with built-in USB - do you have this kind of problem - peripherals not working well?

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Steve
sparky@tamu.edu

[disectamac]

I had a similar problem on an iMac 233. I found that some USB ports are not as snug as others. Also some male USB plugs don't fit as snug in different sockets. You ever notice how you can sometimes shake your USB plug around somewhat loosely even though it's plugged in all the way? If in the process of doing this you here your hardrive working in short breaths, then this is your problem. Well, so it was mine. Try plugging stuff in to different places and although not recommended by Apple is it might void your warranty, try needle nose pliers squeeze the walls of the USB socket closer together, creating a snug USB fit and a more stable USB world. Well, hopefully more stable than your current USB world.

[Qono]

I definitely have had less problems with the trackball mouse than with the keyboard. Usually the mouse would not work right after startup, but after replugging it would work fine. I think the mouse problem was due to being plugged into a crappy keyboard. It could be due to loose fitting into the USB port; I've tried the keyboard in every slot, even on the hub but no dice. I have noticed on my G3 that the audio input fits tight while the output to headphones is loose too.

I posted the following in "Ergonomic or Moronic":

This is exactly the problem I had a while ago with my MS intellimouse and an ergonomic keyboard.
I finally traced the problem to a rogue extension. It is named something like USBHIDUniversal and will show up in the Extension Manager as not belonging to any group. (Note that there is a valid extension with a very similar name that belongs to a group).

I'm suffering on the PCs at school and as such cannot provide the real names.

Hope it helps.
Grant

[Qono]

I just updated to OS 9, I did a clean install so I could move all the old third party extensions manually. I did keep a few extensions out of commission because I didn't know really what they are for, and the USBHID Universal Module was one of them. Is this the one you are referring to? I don't see any others named like that, though. I also disabled USB Mass Storage Ext., USB Mass Storage Support, USBStorageClassShim, USBSuperDiskDriver, USBSuperDiskUTDriver, and XTND Power Enabler. Not sure if I need these or not...I am going to try the 9.0.4 update, and then hook up the keyboard again. Thanks for the suggestion, I hope it works....

The other day I decided to remove USB Adapter Card Support 1.4.1 and go back to 1.3.5. I was looking at the readme for 1.4.1 and notice that I had some extensions of similar names, that were not mentioned directly in the 1.4.1 readme. I assume that these are from older versions. I removed them. (The duplicates) My Turbo ball still worked but I still had problems with the keyboard. So I reverted to 1.3.5 and still - keyboard problems.

I have noticed something about the keyboard problem though. (Adesso Nu•Form) If I would shut the computer off for a couple hours, then booted, the keyboard would work fine. (For a while anyway, after a seemingly random amount of time it stops working again) However if I just unplug the keyboard from the adapter card and reconnect it the keyboard does not work. So I experimented - If I unplug the keyboard for just a few minutes. But I suspected that there must be some sort of capacitor so that on macs that support it, the keyboard could send the power on signal. So I tried the following, When the keyboard stops working I unplug it, press buttons randomly for about 10 seconds always including the powerbutton, and replug the keyboard. The result - so far everytime I plug it back in after this process it has started working again. I suspect this this is purely voodoo.
But the important thing is that it works.

Also - I contacted Adesso. After the general vague message about how to connect it directly to the computer etc they told me that this keyboard requires 200 mA to work properly. If the USB adapter card cannot provide this current, the keyboard will have problems. I am in the process if checking to see if my Belkin USB card can provide this current. I suspect that it might not because when I first got the keyboard, before I updated my USB Adapter Card Software, I would receive error dialogs with the message that the USB card could not provide enought power for some device. I wonder if this is really what's happening and the newer versions of the software have just masked the problem?

Can anyone out there verify my voodoo theory? I'm interested to see if this works for someone else of if it is indeed just voodoo.

Yes, it is called USBHIDUniversalModule and does not belong to any package. In my case, disabling this seemingly rogue extension resolved all of my USB problems.

Hope it works for you.

Dang double posts!

[This message has been edited by GrantS (edited 04-29-2000).]

[Qono]

Not sure if it was the 9.0.4 update or disabling that extension, but it seems to be working so far. Just thought I'd let you know...