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I'm about to kill myself! (Macrumorians I'm Counting On You! )

thebiggoose

thebiggoose

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 17, 2006
266
0
This doesn't have to do with my any of my macs, because they all work great, but it has to do with f*****g XP. Please don't delete this. Someone please answer my questions.

I had to reinstall XP. The disk was SP1. Afterwards, my USB ports wouldn't work. I need these for everything, including my wireless adapter to get on the internet. So I can't download anything. So I tried to download the SP2 updater on my macbook and burned it to a cd, thinking that would help. I updated to SP2 and there is no change. The website for my motherboard (MSI) claims that USB drivers are not needed with SP2 and they don't have any drivers. In The device manager there is nothing to do with USB. Please...Someone please help me!

I'm gonna be screwed if I can't fix this computer soon.

Macrumorians I'm counting on you!
 
Is USB disabled in the BIOS ? Have you installed the chipset drivers for your mobo (from either the cd that came with the mobo or MSI's website ?)
 
mrfrosty said:
Is USB disabled in the BIOS ? Have you installed the chipset drivers for your mobo (from either the cd that came with the mobo or MSI's website ?)
Click to expand...

OMG! I just check the BIOS and USB was disabled. The computer is rebooting now. Hopefully it worked!
 
Judging by the title of this thread, it seems good ol' BIOS alomst claimed another life!

Sometimes I really don't understand why PC users put up with this kind of old crap.
HP, Dell or whoever must try to implement EFI instead.... truly unbelievable.

It's like getting a lovely new BMW and having to open the bonnet every time after filling gas to make sure the startup sequence is set to the internal engine first, and make sure the brakes are not deselected.
Come on. :rolleyes:
 
Ummm I dont know. I always feel more options and control over teh system is better.

Being able to disable USB in bios is a good thing. In a company where data security might be important, having no burners, or USB means nobody can burn CD's or take data on USB drives. If you want to get more data security, you can always lock down internet access too. You can also disable parallel ports, IDE ports, SATA ports...etc. Tons of control.

I also like to be able to control fan speeds manually or underclock / overclock via BIOS or reduce voltage..etc. Again, more control is better and the bios menus are real easy to use too.
 
You mean you like to interrupt the startup seqence (press DEL, F1 or F10....), and get into a pre-Windows totally ugly Norton Commander like interface to help you adjust some settings a partcular BIOS lets you alter??

Some people also enjoy fiddling with the electrics on a car, so that the windscreen wipers actually wipe every 0.92 seconds instead of 0.94.

Look, if it is your hobby to browse the BIOS's interface and adjust everything you think is fun, well nice.
But like the OP most people expect everything to work normally. Why the hell would USB be disabled in the BIOS..?
 
Its ok to say you're not sure what BIOS options exist and or why one may need the control of modifying it. As for why the USB might be disabled in the BIOS:

-its probably an OLD MSI board and they used to ship with them disabled as win95 and first release of 98 had USB issues so they shipped disabled and left it up to the user to decide. NT4 did not support USB out of the box either. Also these options would have been documented in something called a product manual which the OP does not have or bothered to read

-maybe its a used board and the previous owner decided to play with settings

-maybe he's got kids and one was checking out options in the BIOS and was tinkering

-maybe its a used computer from a corporate office which does not allow people to bring things like pen drives from home for use in work machines. In our financial department, we disable USB and Firewire from the BIOS and password protect the BIOS so they cannot be enabled.

Aside from USB functions. One can generally enable disable any of the devices such as onboard sound / modem/ video / parallel and serial ports/ firewire. You can also have a fairly wide control of boot orders and options such as if you want a quick self test or an intensive one. You can have huge control of clock and bus speeds as well as voltages. You can alter fan speeds for one or multiple fans or set it to an automatic so its temperature controlled. You can have RAID options if the motherboard has RAID. You can adjust all kinds of memory timings and options such as enabling or disabling ECC support of the board has that feature. I can probably go on for a few pages.

If you need to find out more about BIOS's and why having the option to change stuff is good, you may want to ask some of the Mac users on this board that also own and build PCs as there are plenty here with experience.

PS... maybe if the users in this thread had a totally ugly Norton Commander like BIOS, they might have been able to change some of the power saving functions and fix the prob ;) https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/340166/



MacsRgr8 said:
You mean you like to interrupt the startup seqence (press DEL, F1 or F10....), and get into a pre-Windows totally ugly Norton Commander like interface to help you adjust some settings a partcular BIOS lets you alter??

Some people also enjoy fiddling with the electrics on a car, so that the windscreen wipers actually wipe every 0.92 seconds instead of 0.94.

Look, if it is your hobby to browse the BIOS's interface and adjust everything you think is fun, well nice.
But like the OP most people expect everything to work normally. Why the hell would USB be disabled in the BIOS..?
Click to expand...
 
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