As school gets into session again, we're getting some great Windows XP/SMART Board support questions. Both of today's questions relate to interfacing your Windows computer to the SMART Board. In one situation, a teacher cannot get her laptop to interface with her laptop when the laptop hybernates. In the second situation, a librarian cannot get her computer to handshake with the SMART Board at all. In both situations, start up your computer, click on the START menu tab on the lower left corner of your computer and drag up to "Control Panel," select it (as shown) and let go of your mouse button. If you do not have administrator access rights to your computer, you might not be able to do these things.
Here you see some of the Control Panel icons. Were' going to talk about the Power Options and Systems icons. Double click on the "Power Options" to get to the controls to keep your computer from going to sleep or hybernating. Later on, you will double-click on the Systems icon, if you want to tweek the USB drivers. . . . . .
Here you see the Power Option properties. Just use your mouse, to turn all the pull down choices to "Never." This will allow your computer to never hybernate (as a power saving feature) so now, your comptuer will always stay connected to your board. Just this weekend, I turned the Power Saving features off on one of our office computers, because that computer was hosting some shared data on our network, and everytime that computer hybernated, noone else could access that data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sometimes your computer's USB device drivers get corrupted, and your SMART Board might not work. I always try a bunch of other things before I do this, so this is one of my "last resorts" after I uninstall and reinstall SMART Board software. Again, go to the START tab, select Control Panels, and double-click the System icon (looks like a blue computer with a brown check mark in the monitor). Click on the Hardware tab at the top of the System Properties dialog box, then click on the Device Manager button. You can create a lot of havoc here, so be careful.
This pop-up window displays all of the devices that the Windows XP operating system is controlling on your computer. Way at the bottom is the Unviersal Serial Bus (USB) controllers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Right click to highlight the first listing, which is the main USB host controller in Windows XP, then pull down to Disable it. You can keep doing that for all of the USB host controllers if you want to (the USB2 Host Controller is listed for supporting USB 2.0 devices). This seems like a scary thing to me, every time I do it, because it feels like I'm throwing away software that I'll never get again, but when you reboot your XP machine, XP OS rebuilds all the USB Host Controllers (very quickly). So, you aren't goofing anything up. The only thing to remember, is that if you have USB keyboard and mice, you will only be able to shut your machine off by pulling out AC power and plugging it back in (unless you have set your computer to reboot when you press the power button... part of the Power Management settings). So, if all else fails, and you've already UNINSTALLED and reinstalled SMART Board software, this is worth a try. Before doing this, I would hard wire a "known good" USB cable to the board, and would plug a known good computer, too, to verify that the problem isn't the cable.
