I recently purchased a couple of PS/2-USB adapters that have caused me a lot of trouble.
They were originally to be used with a PS/2 KVM switch (the only kind I could lay my hands on, on short notice), with an older workstation and a new USB only box, both running WinXP Pro.
I set up the new PC, a Dell Optiplex, with a USB keyboard and mouse, connected directly. Everything worked fine. A couple of days later, I came back to set up the switch, using the adapters to connect it to the Optiplex. At that point, the PC wouldn’t recognize the keyboard or the mouse.
I took the KVM out of the loop and tried connecting the PS/2 keyboard and mouse with the adapters, and the PC still didn’t recognize them (Device Manager saw them as “unknown devices”). The PC was fine with USB keyboard and mouse connected directly.
My first thought was that the IOGear KVM was incompatible with something in the Optiplex. However, I later tried using the same adapters to connect a PS/2 keyboard and mouse to another USB-only box, and had the same results. In this case, I had previously used another set of adapters with complete success.
It seems pretty clear to me that the adapters are the culprits. Does anyone have any other thoughts? Has anyone seen anything similar?
Thanks.