@#$%!! keyboard problem....

[bocantu]

I recently (foolishly)said I would help a friend of mine peice together an old pc together so she could have one. I scrapped a few parts from a few diff. pc's and put it al together fired it up and after it gets done reading what drives are installed the keyboard quits working. I can hit delete to get into the bios before it reads the harddrives etc. but right after that moment the keylock goes off and the board goes dead. any ideas on what to try next ? oh yeah its an old style keyboard with the big 3/4 inch plug on it. and I'm trying to use win 95 but it never gets to startup cause it wants me to hit f1 to continue due to some other problem. any help would much appreciated...

[Bovon]

If it is an older motherboard, I would suspect the BIOS battery.. take it out and maybe a trip to a Walmart / jewelers can test it for you. The socket on the mainboard may be flaky.. I have seen them get real touchy. Do you see the LEDs flash during boot?.. I would presume you have checked in the BIOS setup to make sure it is configured correctly for that keyboard?

Not that it matters really..but why Win95?.. that is a 16 bit platform, and Win 98 would be much better..unless you only have 16 (or so) mb of RAM. Win95 doesn't like 32 bit programs, but Win98 will run 16 bit programs.. a much better choice if the RAM and HDD space is available.