I seem to have a continuous line of stories dealing with friend's windows machines. This is one of the "weirder" ones. One of my friends has a Windows 2000 box. She needed more memory, so we purchased it and installed it without a hitch. The problems arose when we restarted the machine. The USB cables were not reinserted into their original ports and the optical mouse was recognized as a "new" piece of hardware. Win2K then proceeded to load drivers that it thought were the correct ones, but which were not. This in itself was not a problem. As you can always "Add/Remove Hardware and reinstall new drivers etc.... but in this case, windows disabled the PS2 mouse and the new drivers that were installed did not work with this mouse. Now, you try choosing a radio button without a mouse?? (To do it via the keyboard works, ONLY when one of the radio buttons are selected by default in the case of the Add/Remove Hardware radio buttons, for some odd reason you could get to the page itself to choose a mouse to deselect, but windows would not default to ANY of the radio buttons, so you were "kinda outta luck". The TAB and arrow keys did not work). So here we were, without a mouse, trying to uninstall a mouse, but to use the uninstall feature you needed a mouse!!! Not a great situation to be in. So I decided to get clever. I went home and got the logier CD that came with my mouse and used that to install the drivers. It worked like a dream. The mouse worked, windows restarted and I thought we were off to the racecourse. But no, of course not, we get to the username and password screen and I start to type in the password, and as soon as I hot the letter 'u' the utility manager from windows popped up. I could use EVERY key of the keyboard except 'u'. The 'u' started the utility manager. But this was a problem, as I the password to the machine had a 'u' in it and to disable any services I needed to get it. I was panicking (but the duck type of panicking... I looked all calm on the outside, smiling and laughing, but I was kicking like anything on the inside). Then it dawned on me, try another account with admin privelegesfor Windows. With a bit of luck, it would not have a 'u'. Well, if noone knows of another username and password, what one would you try?? You guessed it!!! Man, was I in luck!!! I got in, disabled the utility service, and we could log in again to the normal account with the old password. It was a close call, but Thank G-d, all worked out well in the end. For further tales from the "dark side" come again soon Keep :-) Uriel
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posted by Dubb on: Apr 27, 2005 12:02am
I disabled utility manager in my Admin Tools, but now I can't use the 'U' on the keyboard at all! What do I do?
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