I'm refurbishing an old machine (Pentium 1 or 2) for a friend. It uses a serial mouse that Windows doesn't detect even though I reformatted the HD and reinstalled Windows ME. There are no PS/2 ports on this old jalopy--it uses the old-style large keyboard connection. I tried a couple different serial mice but none work. Thinking it might be an IRQ conflict I took out all cards but still Windows doesn't see the mouse. OK, I figure there's more than one way to sking a cat so I installed a USB expansion card in the mobo, rebooted, plugged in a USB mouse and still nothing.

My next step is to put in a second serial connection and see if the mouse works on that connection but I'm starting to wonder if I'm wasting my time. Is there something I'm overlooking? The BIOS is set to PnP.

Relztrah

Are the serial ports enabled in the BIOS? Windows should detect a serial mouse no problem, and use it's native driver.

Where do I look in the BIOS to see if the serial port is enabled?

Eash bios is different so you will have to look around to find it.

Also have you tried adding a standard microsoft serial mouse via add remove hardware.

I'm not sure what I did in the BIOS, but I enabled everything that looked like it should be enabled in order to get the serial mouse to work...which didn't help. But somehow I got the system to recognize the USB port and now the USB mouse works. All's well that ends well.