Proprietary keyboard???

Factual Questions
1

Last night I went to my niece’s house to help with her computer(Sony Vaio, about 2 yrs old). She had contracted the Sasser worm, and I removed it for her. Then I wanted to install the XP security patches, which she had not been keeping up with. Since she only has a dial-up modem, and the downloads would have taken 5+ hours, I suggested that I take her computer home with me and connect to my DSL.

When I got home, I hooked up her computer to my monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. and turned it on. It booted up to Windows, but when I went to type in her password, the keyboard did not respond. Rechecked the connection, rebooted, no keyboard. Tried another keyboard. Same problem.

Finally I called her and went back to her house to get her keyboard. When I plugged in her keyboard it worked like a champ. Is Sony that proprietary that they require their own special keyboard? I’ve never seen this before. Anyone else have similar experiences?

2

Is it a USB keyboard? I’ve noticed XP can be a little tetchy about USB keyboards.

3

No, it has a standard PS2 connector. There must be some kind of special driver for it, but I’d always assumed that the keyboard was one of the things that the BIOS took care of.

4

Odd. I’ve used standard keyboards on Vaio’s before. Did the regular keyboards socket fully? If there was a broken off pin from the Vaio keyboard in the socket it might have prevented other keyboard from socketing and/or intializing fully.

5

My girlfriend’s Vaio (with XP Pro) has an Apple Macintosh USB keyboard from an old iMac on it, and it works fine. If it’s compatible with that, it’s pretty damn compatible. I suspect you’ve got bad cables or buggies remain in the Vaio.