I have recently purchased a Saitek PZ30AU Eclipse keyboards after drowning my old trusty black, budget keyboard in OJ. I am very happy with the Eclispe keyboard....except for one very annoying problem. The problem occurs if I have the Eclipse keyboard into a USB port on the rear on my motherboard (Chaintech 7NJS Ultra). It causes a 30-40 delay (and a blank black screen) just before WinXP logo bootup screen appears. However if I have the keyboard plugged into a USB port at the front of my case, via a multimedia drive (Chaintech C-Box 3), my PC boots up as normal with no delay to the WinXP boot sequence. My motherboard USB drivers are up to date, so why is the Eclispe keyboard causing this problem when it's plugged into a rear USB port? (BTW, the keyboard works fine in either rear or front USB port once WinXP is up and running.)
Saitek got back to me on the problem with the above keyboard. It appears that the extra power required by the keyboard is causing my motherboard to have problems with it on startup when using the rear (mobo) USB ports. It's appareantly a known issue with the way some mobos deal with the device at the base hardware level. Even though everything runs fine for me through any front USB port. Bizzare or crap engineering?
Is it possible to buy a cheap external self-powered hub? I don't think that essential devices like keyboards have to be connected to the root hub.
I was wondering if I could use one of those green USB to keyboard/mouse port converters that come with all MS mice and jack it into the keyboard port. Would that work?
I doubt it. While mouse and keyboard PS/2 ports are physically interchangable, the data packets are not. The silicon in the converter will likely be specifically tailored to MS's mice, as well.
True....if I do find a spare converter I'll give a try and see what happens. If it works I'll post it here, but I doubt it will.
Maybe I just got lucky, but I got a USB-PS/2 converter with my wireless keyboard/mouse combo. I'e tested it on mice other than the one it came with, and they all worked fine. You can typically buy the convertors for less than $5-10, depending on the computer store you get it from. Hope this helps.
Get a USB 2 Hub with an external power source, I had this same problem with a different keyboard, the USB ports wouldn't supply enough juice and it was causing all sorts of weird instability problems, so I bought a USB 2 hub from work that came with a 2 Amp AC adaptor, plugged it in through that and now the hub can supply enough juice to my keybaord without the system suffering.
