How can I find drivers for this USB hub multimedia keyboard?

June 29, 2004 11:34 AM

Soon after spilling half of a bottle of Rolling Rock into my keyboard, I ordered the cheapest USB hub multimedia one I could find. It arrived today, sans drivers: only the volume and mute work. Drivers I've downloaded either have no effect or only allow me to program a few of the buttons. If HP's own drivers don't work, am I SOL? Or might one of you know of a solution?

Aw jeez: I should mention that it works fine as a normal keyboard and as a USB hub. It's just those tiny grey buttons scattered along the top & sides that are giving me grief.

posted by skryche to technology (4 comments total)

My guess is that the buttons DO work, they simply aren't mapped to anything. This has been the case for me in the past before. Each key on a keyboard has a code associated with it. Some codes are standard, i.e. all the regular keys, but some are not. All the extra little gray keys are not, although it may be that some are more standard than others, like many keyboards have a volume function and maybe they all use the same codes, I don't know.

I don't have any experience mapping keycodes in windows, but I've done it in linux. Someone here will probably know what you can use to bind them in windows.
Is this the driver? If not, this website might have it somewhere. HP might have it on their website under the support section. Have you tried updating the driver, including the ability to search online for a new one?
posted by RustyBrooks at 11:59 AM on June 29, 2004

I tried a few of the drivers on the site (and on HP's site), none of them worked.

Also tried updating the driver automatically. WinXP Home sez: "The Wizard could not find a better match for your hardware". For the record, the driver I'm using now is "HID Keyboard Device"
posted by skryche at 12:44 PM on June 29, 2004

I don't know about your HP keyboard, but I've got a Logitech and I had to install not just the right Windows keyboard driver but also a separate software utility that manages all the extra keys and allows me to configure them. With only the keyboard driver, none of the extra keys work.
posted by fuzz at 12:55 PM on June 29, 2004

On the page you cited above, there's a link (although not with a proper <a> tag it seems) labelled "download drive" and I'm sure that means "download driver". If that fails, why not just try support.hp.com and look for the driver download section.
posted by Stoatfarm at 1:06 PM on June 29, 2004