I have a very frustrating problem with my keyboard and wonder if you can help me.

About every fourth or fifth time I boot up my computer, the keyboard is frozen. The only way to get it to work is to reboot at least once and sometimes up to three or four times before it will work.

My computer is 6 months old, an Intel Pentium 4 clone with a Microsoft PS/2 keyboard and a PS/2 optical mouse.

I have had the keyboard replaced. The new PS/2 keyboard is a bit better but has not cured the problem.

Have you any solutions to this problem?

Tom Code, Brockville, Ontario

You have already spent too much money fixing something that’s not your fault by buying a new PS/2 keyboard, Mr. C., but I need to tell you that you almost certainly can fix this by getting a new keyboard once again.

But this time make it a USB model rather than the older PS/2 types that plug in with circular connectors instead of the flat USB prongs.

These problems happen when a computer’s power-saving routines cause the main microprocessor to check to see if a key has been pressed at the same time another part of the chip orders power-saving steps like shutting off the monitor or stopping the hard drive from spinning.

This is called polling the keyboard, and it happens every few split seconds as the computer waits for a key to be pressed to take the next step. When the power saver kicks in at the same split second that the computer is waiting to hear back from the keyboard, these freeze-ups can occur. A USB model will have different timing characteristics and thus not react the same way the PS/2 keyboard does on your machine.

The other way to fix this, of course, is to shut down the environmentally (and pocketbook) friendly power-saving feature.



I am running Windows ME and I have a program on my computer called viewmgr and I don’t know what it is supposed to do. It periodically attempts to access the Internet but is stopped by my firewall.

Can you tell me what viewmgr does, and should I allow it to access the Internet?

Bernie [email protected]

A. You are among growing ranks of computer users who have acquired Viewpoint Media Player, a relatively harmless but sometimes annoying bit of software that is used to display animations and other material along the lines of Macromedia’s Flash software.

Like many Web-based program packages, this one makes frequent checks to its home base to see if there are updates.

The good news is that Viewpoint creates a Control Panel that can be used to shut it down, thus ending the problem with little more fuss than a few mouse clicks. Or you can be more proactive and use the Add/Remove Programs tool in Windows to erase the program if you prefer.

Click on Start and then Control Panel and look for the one called VMP and click it open to find the on/off switch. Or with Control Panel open, select Add/Remove Programs and look for the same VMP software there. Click the Remove button and you’ll be done with VMP for now.

Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at [email protected]