HP Pavilion ze4300 Keyboard/mouse Hickups

I know she's an old one compared to the new shiny ones everybody has, but I like her. Always been there when I needed to do some work or play.

I figured at least one of you might know how to remedy this, and dont say "Buy a new one" It honestly is not an option for a poor working stiff like me who has to make his pennies stretch

I fixed this problem a long time ago and for the life of me I cant remember how I did it. The Keyboard and Mouse wil hang at regular intervals of four to five seconds in which time, you lose whatever you typed or wherever you pointed. The first thing I thought of was to remove and allow windows to reinstall the kb and mouse drivers.... Nothing... Same old problem. Being of the old DOS generation The first thing that came to my mind was that there must have been an IRQ problem with some of the other onboard devices. I checked and windows XP says no conflicts, however, I noticed that they PILED almost every device in this thing on IRQ 10 and I can see no way to get them off of it. Windows wont even let you manually move them.

I did notice something very funny though in the performance tab of the task manager. A small spike of cpu usage occurs at the same time as the lockups of the two items in question.

I stripped out all of the software after a clean reinstall hoping that this might fix it, then disabled all non-essential hardware including all the com and LPT ports hoping that the thing would move some of the other devices on the freed up IRQ's... Nothing. THis was a reason I quit using Compaqs. They pile all that hardware on the same IRQ and its a nightmare to sort it all out.

The point of using the thing was so I would have the keyboard and all the rest self contained and not to have to plug all that desktop crud into it to prevent headaches...

I'm at my whits end. Ive done it before, I dont remember if it was something I disabled or something I terminated and removed, but I got it going and it lasted me a couple of years, but since the reinstall, its back and seems worse than I remember.

THIS SUX!!!

Am I looking at a bad keyboard controller or something?