A business customer calls, saying the keyboard on one of their PCs is not working anymore… and they cannot get email to work.

When I get there, I see its a wireless keyboard and mouse… the batteries are new, and the mouse works fine.

I trace the “base station” ie the wireless send/receiver for the mouse/keyboard, and I see the mouse portion is a round ps2 plug, and the keyboard part is a usb plug… but the usb plug goes into a usb to ps2 keyboard adapter.

I see an amazing number of computers that have these adapters (either for keyboard or mouse or both!). In most cases (unless someone is running win98), I just move the usb plug into a spare usb socket… avoiding the ps2 plug.

Anyway, I do the same thing here, and after a reboot, the keyboard is working again.

And I find out why the email wasn’t working: email was started using using the email button on the keyboard… so nobody knew how to start email using the start menus anymore!