[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Just for interest the legacy keyboard setting is actually the USB keyboard for legacy OS (Dos) setting.

During a cold start the system always enables legacy support, no matter what the setting, so you can get into the BIOS. If the setting is off then the BIOS will disable support as soon as it hands control to the OS, leaving Dos with no keyboard.

If the setting is on then the BIOS will leave support enabled but Windows will switch it off as soon as it loads its USB and keyboard drivers.

I don’t think a restart will re-enable support if the setting is off.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Something screwey there ?

Plugging in a PS/2 keyboard may well help you but a proper fix might require clearing the CMOS settings.

Before you do that though, if the PS/2 keyboard lets you get into CMOS setting, try changing the legacy keyboard setting to off and saving then changing it to on and saving again. Stranger things have worked for me?

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Sorry John but I always use a PS/2 keyboard given the chance so no spares ?

I know you have tried the legacy keyboard setting in the BIOS but have you looked at the halt on error setting ? Sometimes just changing this to “all but keyboard” and saving the settings can help.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Well we are still here.

Long may the shareing continue

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

I was going to say squirrel sh1t but you win the prize ?

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Oh no don’t tempt me

How about a topic about topic’s

What has a hazle nut in every bite ,

???

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Just an up date.

I just ran the InSpectere utillity again on my mum’s PC and it now shows Windows protection against Meltdown but still no protection against Spectre.

The report says the CPU dose not have hardware support for the windows patch so the system is being slowed and that a microcode/Bios update would be needed to fix Spectre.

CPU Intel J2900

Windows 1709 Build 16299.192

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

I thought i was fairly safe Ed because a few months ago I deleted a batch of files from my SSD and then did nothing special except use my computer for a couple of days.

Out of interest i then ran the Recover program from the makers of CCleaner using its deep scan option and all it found was a couple of file names that it said were beyond recovery.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

I have also wondered how usefull disk scrubber programs are on an SSD, espesially with TRIM enabled.

Is there any way to recover data from flash ram that has been erased ?

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Another pice of useless software is the memory “optimizer”.

The Windows memory manager does a pretty good job of keeping potentially usefull data in physical memory. You will seldom see much memory marked as actually free because Windows will quickly reasign it to other things like the super fetch cache.

Windows will also keep recently released memory on a standby list for a while before zeroing it for use by other processes, just in case its needed again soon.

The memory optimiser just starts a process that demands the maximum amount of committed memory possible. The memory manager is forced to use all the free memory, then its cached memory, then memory from any other processes that are active but idle until no more can be allocated.

At this point the memory optimizer terminates its process leaving you with a large amount of free and totally empty memory that will now have to be refilled with usefull data.

And they ask you to pay for this service !

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

The other thing that has caught me out is Windows “sticky keys” feature. Make sure this is turned off in the control panel accessability options.

You should have to press a modifier key like CTRL, shift, alt or Windows, 5 times quickly to turn this on but if you hold down one of those keys then auto repeat will do it for you !

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

You could try a keyboard test utility like the one from softpedia.com

This will give you the keboard scan codes as well as the Windows internal key codes and it displays the last key pressed until you hit reset.

If you see a key press before you touch anything then it could be a stuck key

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Apparently this game can be made to work on W7 with the nGlide Glide wrapper and a patch. The game must be run from a hard disc copy too because the exe file must be renamed due to having been spelt Ultim@te with the “@” in it.

As I have a spare copy of W7 I will give it a go in virtual box next week when I get time.

 

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Thanks for the thought Boris but after much searching I have identified the program as Ultimate Race Pro.

The thing is though it dosen’t look quite as Ultimate as I remember it !

This was the first program I ran on my new 3DFX Voodoo 2 graphics card and I was seriously impressed but looking at You Tube video of it now shows its age.

I remember I liked the physics and control system too but I can’t test that out because although it can be downloaded for free no one has been able to make it run on W10 with a modern graphics card.

Oh well ?

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Oh you sceptic John ?

I normally question Microsofts motives too but the Windows error reporting service (WER) you pointed to is actually used most often to deal with errors in third party software.

WER is the last stage of dealing with unhandled exception errors and it is the thing that creates a mini dump to send to microsoft for possible investigation.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Oh well. Comes a time to call time ?

Out of interest though did you mean that you just don’t have a Windows setup DVD ?

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

I was flustersd at the time ?

The email had all the correct logo’s and even paypal’s correct address at the bottom.

Looking back at the email one doddgy thing is that it started “Dear Dearsley” not “Dear Mr Dearsley” or “Dear Graham”.

I forwarded the email to paypal at their “spoof” address two days ago because they asked me to and got a nice letter back telling me how to not be so stupid in future ???

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Good luck ?

I really would have tried the repair install option from the W10 DVD first though ?

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Yes you should disable secure boot if you want to try booting from discs that don’t have a valid digital signature because if you don’t then the PC will act as if they don’t even exist ?

There are usually at least two steps to make sure its REALLY off though. Depending on the BIOS.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Shame the off/on trick didn’t work as its usually the best one !

Its just a thought but you haven’t got MAC filtering enabled have you ? I say that because “unknown devices” are listed.

Failing that then a paper clip in the reset hole is my next favorite trick ?

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