Another Vista problem (looks like I underestimated the number of vista problems I’d get this year…).

This time, customer upgraded XP via: vista home premium upgrade academic

And his keyboard stopped working. The keyboard works fine on other PCs, and other keyboards (usb and PS2)  would not work.

Device manager shows a problem with the keyboard (code 39)

I tried the obvious: update the driver, but vista would say “you already have the latest driver”.

OK, delete the driver… but the bad driver gets reinstalled from the driver cache.

After some searching, I found a vague reference to various drivers not working for upgrades, whereas clean installations are no problem.

So, using the technique from the “windows secrets” newsletter, I did a fresh install of the vista 30 day trial (with no license code). I then did a vista upgrade, with the correct license code… and all went well.

There was a slight hiccup with validation and updates… I got an error message about a possible problem withe the date and time… I adjusted the time (it was out by 1 hour)… but I still got the error message… I eventually realised that the year was set to 1999 🙂

easily fixed, and customer is happy.