Thinkpads Forum

Am I the only one?

I was on my T60 last night when windows notified me of available updates. I looked and they were the usual sort we saw every month, so I let them install.
After the required restart, my keyboard, pointer and scratchpad are useless. Device manager indicates "Windows cannot initialize the device driver for this hardware".

Microsoft is forcing OS updates by rendering hardware useless?

AFAIK, you must be the only one.

I did updates last night on one of my T60s that runs XP for now, and I paid special attention to it, as I was looking for a MSE update I didn't want. (Mentioned in another thread here) But nothing was rendered useless after this update. It almost seem like your entire keyboard /Trackpad is gone from the device manager, as the entries you see are standard items. Did something happen to the T60 at the same time that can have done something to the keyboard? Liquid spills or something hard falling on it? If you feel comfortable doing it, take out the keyboard and check the plug and the cable. And even better: If you have access to another T60/T61/R61 (And even T400/T500 I think?) keyboard, try with that to exclude a hardware fault with the keyboard itself. I assume you have already tried to update the drivers, and/or look for new hardware, if possible?

I haven't done much with it yet, and no, it didn't have anything spilled / wasn't moved / didn't get bumped ect. It was just on the desk as usual and I restarted when Windows Update indicated.

The "generic" appearance is due to a cold installation of XP (no IBM or Lenovo recovery or restore discs for it).

I'll look for Lenovo based drivers and start there since there is no "roll back" for the drivers. If that fails, I'll try removing the last update. I did intend to upgrade to 7 eventually and never imagined that I would be rendered useless when XP product support ended.

I was listening to a locally hosted talk show on the AM band and others have had similar issues on their computers (more than likely not IBM/Lenovo specific). There must be a magic combination of hardware and driver sets that can cause an issue.

I'm 99% certain this is not a hardware issue since the only thing that happened was the OS update and a restart...everything was fine up to the point of the restart.

UPDATE:
At 4:15PM 4-9-14 I had a popup appear informing me there was an important windows update.
Windows update provided me with a Synaptics update that restored the keyboard and pointer(s).

Must be I was not the only person with an issue who complained to Microsoft.

Interesting case. So you never used the Thinkpad drivers, only the generic Microsoft ones. I guess that can explain it. Something they did affected their generic set of drivers, and things stopped working. I am surprised it affected the entire keyboard and not just the TrackPad, but stranger things have happened. I would of course recommend installing Lenovo's Ultranav Utility, but if things work, it might be good enough as it is..

I'll be installing the Ultranav utility this weekend... Letting the T60 enter sleep mode replicates the lockout.