Computer Broken - Keyboard shortcuts making it impossible to type

burntheladle

I went to visit my mum last week, and came home with her toshiba laptop because it's behaving erratically and is essentially useless. She'd like me to fix it, obviously, but I do have the option of taking it to a professional if I can't work out what's wrong.

The main problem seems to be that the keyboard is riddled with shortcuts that override whatever you're doing , making it impossible to type. If you press M, the window minimizes; if you press L, you get logged out...

She also said that if you open a program like excel, it will start scrolling down through the cells and won't stop. I haven't been able to duplicate this, though.

I'm running spybot and adware at the moment - I had to burn the install files to a CD and load them from that since I couldn't google them - but I suspect there might be something more directly wrong with the keyboard? None of the keys are actually stuck down though...

Any advice as to how to fix this?

DrFrylock

Those aren't shortcuts. For some reason Windows believes that the Windows key is being held down. Windows-M minimizes everything. Windows-L locks the computer.

Sounds like it could be a bum keyboard. I doubt it's a software/malware problem. On a laptop, that's an issue:

1) Plug in an external keyboard and see if there's anything you can do. Odds are, no, but just in case, because both keyboards will be working in tandem.

2) Go on Toshiba's site and see if you can find the service manual for that brand of laptops. Often, keyboards are fairly easy to remove. Remove and reseat the laptop keyboard and see if that helps. Alternatively, while you have it out, look for any gunk under the keys that might be causing the contacts to short or something.

3) If that doesn't work, you can probably still use the machine if you disconnect the laptop keyboard and use an external one. Warning: on many laptops these are connected with the fragilest of little ribbon cables, so be careful. Order a new one from Toshiba, or try to find one on eBay. If the machine is still under warranty, just call Toshiba.

Willeth

My brother had a similar thing with his Dell after falling asleep on it. He fixed it by removing the battery for ten minutes or so, turning his laptop upside down and making sure that all the keys were 'up', and replacing the battery, before turning it on while upside down. Apparently this 'resets' the keyboard's default keypress settings.

trentsteel

My guess would be that someone poured a sugary drink on some of your keys.

That's just a guess though.

burntheladle

I've discovered that if I open and close task manager, the problem goes away (without doing anything in task manager, just ctrl+alt+del and then exit), or if I hold the windows key down for about 5-10 seconds. That makes me think it's not a hardware problem, am I wrong?

Edit: We tried the battery thing, now it makes a whooping noise when it starts up and won't boot. It's going to the computer shop tomorrow.