An aside regarding Windows vs. DOS mouse drivers. At one of my contracts
recently, we received a Toshiba laptop, model 220CDS...identical to a
hundred others within the enterprise. (Or I should say, started out
identical on the day they were rolled out... ;-)

The complaint was that the machine would not recognize the cd-rom drive (it
had one bay, and you must swap the floppy drive for the cd drive.) We put
in a known good cd-rom drive, and still it was not recognized. (Got the
"drive not ready" message.) Eventually, it was discovered that the user's
spouse had helpfully added a reference to a DOS mouse driver in the
autoexec.bat. In a Windows 95 environment, it had the effect of making the
cd-rom drive unrecognizable, presumably because we would need a DOS cd-rom
driver as well.

We removed the reference to the DOS mouse driver in the autoexec.bat,
rebooted, and poof, the supposedly defective cd-rom drive reappeared.

Susan Sutherland

----------
> From: David Gillett <[log in to unmask]>
> To:
> Subject: Re: weird mouse behavior
> Date: Friday, February 26, 1999 10:27 AM
>
> On 25 Feb 99, at 14:34, Daniel Ellis wrote:
>
> > I am working on a clients PC Express older 486 running Win95 a.
> > Everytime it gets in windows, windows does not detect a mouse.  It is
> > a serial mouse on com1.
>
>   I've seen this several times -- mostly on 486s, though I've no idea
> why.
>
>   The fix (which I originally got from someone here... Bob?) has been
> to install a DOS serial mouse driver (the mouse probably came with
> one...) in CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT (depending on whether the driver
> is a .SYS or .EXE file).
>   Although Win95 might fail to detect the mouse hardware properly, it
> will see the DOS mouse software and "take over" its function, properly
> supporting the mouse that it previously could not detect.
>
>
> David G
>

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