Sam Heywood wrote:
>You all might easily suppose that by simply unloading
>a mouse driver you would thereby free up your serial
>port to use it for attaching an alternative device
(snip)
>Well, I edited my AUTOEXEC.BAT
>and remarked out the line that loads my mouse driver, so
>that the mouse driver would not even get loaded in the
>first place upon re-booting. Then
The Compaq SLT 386/20 portable on which I am running Arachne has only one
serial port. That doesn't sound too bad, until I add that as standard
equipment it has no separate mouse port. You can use a mouse, or you can
use a modem, BUT NOT BOTH at the same time. (And this unit was built well
inside the Windows era; no excuse for this, except that Compaq wanted to
make extra money selling you another serial card or a modem.) That's one
reason I'm using Arachne; it's fully controllable from the keyboard.
Anyway, I face the same situation you describe above every day. I may not
have a mouse attached, but the instruction to load the mouse driver is part
of AUTOEXEC.BAT.
However, I have not experienced the problem you have. On bootup, I am duly
informed that the system can't find the mouse, and maybe I should try
connecting to another serial port. When I thereafter load Arachne and use a
modem on the sole serial port, it works fine. I'm not clear if the loading
of the mouse driver aborts when it can't find the mouse, or if the driver
loads but doesn't cause problems. In any case, I do not have to REM out the
part of AUTOEXEC.BAT pertaining to the mouse driver.
