R500 and legacy USB keyboard support

Hi, 1st message here from me.

I have just got an R500-124, which is a model with 64G SSD and Vista pre-installed (which doesn't suck quite as much as I imagined!)

Anyway, in the office I dock the R500 and use it with external keyboard, mouse, screens, etc. However, the legacy keyboard support in the BIOS doesn't seem to work. The USB keyboard does zilch until the machine has booted Windows or Linux, which is an issue as it means I have to open the lid of the notebook, type my drivecrypt password on the built-in beyboard, and then shut the lid quickly so my screens are used correctly.

Can any other R500 owners kindly check whether a USB keyboard works in the BIOS? Can you (say) use Esc to get into the BIOS and/or F12 to choose boot device as neither work for me. But USB keys do work, so the BIOS has functional USB just not USB keyboard.

The machine came with BIOS version 1.5 and I upgraded to 1.6 with high hopes but it's still broken in this newer version.

Thanks

Ian

 

I can check next week.

At the moment I am in a different continent to my R500.

John

 

I have just done a test with my R500 rebooting with an external USB keyboard plugged in. Pressing Esc on the external keyboard during the initial boot resulted in a "Check system. Then Press [F1] key" message. Pressing F1 on the external keyboard took me to the BIOS. etc.

So an external USB keyboard seems to work for me. Is your external keyboard plugged into the dock? if so, what happens if you plug it directly into the R500?

John

 

Many thanks for testing this. Yesterday, I got a chance to do more testing with a variety of keyboards connected in a variety of ways.

1) All the keyboards I could find quickly (six) worked as long as they were connected to the R500 *after* it powered up (so power up, then plug in keyboard at drivecrypt password prompt)
2) All of these keyboards worked with a Toshiba R100 and other PCs whether connected at power up time or afterwards.
3) Only one keyboard worked with the R500 if connected before power up, and this is an identical model to the initial keyboard I used that only worked if connected after power up!
4) The keyboard that works with the R500 works even when connect to one of the dock's USB connector. Keyboards that don't work fail even when plugged directly into the R500 with it undocked.
5) Keyboards that fail with the R500 give a quick flash of numlock at power up and then go totally dead and unresponsive. An unplug/replug cycle gets them going again.

So, the R500 seems fussy about USB keyboards but only if they keyboard is connected at power up. Connecting after power up, including a quick unplug/replug afterwards, always worked in my tests. Keyboards that cause problems work fine on other machines, including other Toshiba notebooks.

Anyway, I now have a working solution, which is great, but it does suggest that future keyboard replacement might be a bit of a gamble. Fortunately, in our company environment, we have lots of spares around. A home user might find life more difficult.

Ian

 

Thanks for the update. So there's more subtle variations in external keyboards than we would expect. Maybe I struck lucky with the first one I tried.

John