Keyboard & Mouse USB Devices Not Recognized

USB devices (Predominantly Keyboard & Mouse) not recognized on Windows 10

We’ve just had an interesting, and new to us, issue on a customers PC.

They’d been using Windows 10 for several months without issue, then one day they turned it on to find that the keyboard and mouse was unresponsive, as it turned out the USB hub had been disabled and they swore blind that it wasn’t them, judging from the various forums on Google they weren’t the only one with this issue.

It definitely wasn’t a hardware issue with the Keyboard & mouse as they would work in the BIOS perfectly. Now typically in this situation we would have plugged in a PS/2 Keyboard & mouse and resolved the problem, unfortunately this PC was a Dell Optiplex 745 which doesn’t have an on-board PS/2 connection.

To resolve the problem we took the hard drive from the machine and plugged it in to another machine with a different chipset, this caused Windows 10 to setup up drivers again and although we’d used the same keyboard and mouse as previously it work perfectly.

Once in Windows we opened an elevated command prompt and typed the command

SET devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1

This enables non present devices in the device manager. Having done that we opened the device manager (Run dialog, devmgmt.msc) and clicked on view and “Show hidden devices”. When you expand the menu’s you should now see lots of items greyed out, these are previously installed but disconnected devices.

We proceeded to remove all greyed out items under “Universal Serial Bus controllers”, likewise under “Human Interface Devices” & “Mice”. Once done we shut down, put the hard drive back in to the original machine, started it and Tada, keyboard & mouse work without issue.

If you get stuck or this all seems a little too much, why not give One Touch Services a call on 01784 77 04 02? or visit our Contact us page.