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Keyboard Freezes
Arkan
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
My computer keeps doing this weird thing that forces me to restart it. Ordinarily it only happens once every few days and isn't so bad, but tonight it happened three times in the span of 30 minutes, pissing me off enough to finally ask the internet for help.
And for the record, no, this has nothing to do with my toilet, this has been happening on and off for at least 9 months. I've asked multiple people and every single one has given me a different answer. The answers vary from the computer simply getting old, the fact that it's a dell and they apparently have shorts in the power supplies, the RAM going bad, a sound driver issue... probably more.
I am on a dell laptop.
Here's what it's doing:
-Every now and then, the keyboard will 'freeze'. When I say freeze, what it does is it refuses to take any input and constantly repeats whatever key I hit last. It will always do this as I hit a key, never when I'm not touching the keyboard. This might seem hard to verify, but I've never come back from not hitting the keyboard, tried to do something, and have it not respond- it always happens as I'm doing something and there's always something visibly going on that's a sign of the repeating input- for instance in an FPS where the repeating key is "A" it forces me to constantly strafe left. ctrl-alt-del doesn't work.
-If I manage to exit the program, the repeated input stops, but the keyboard doesn't unfreeze.
-This usually happens when I have a game of some kind open; this has happened to me in everything to World of Warcraft, Team Fortress, every single source engine game (HL2, HL:source, etc), and even old games like Stronghold: Crusader. This doesn't mean the problem is exclusive to games; a few times it has happened while I'm only typing in a word processor with no programs visibly open on the computer otherwise.
-Restarting the computer fixes the problem and it usually doesn't recur for a while (a day or more). I say usually because on several occasions (including tonight) it constantly happens over and over. This may be related to what I'm doing at the time (tonight I was running an instance in WoW; it was fine before, did this 3 times during the instance, and stopped as soon as I left), or it could simply be sheer random chance.
-There appear to be no other symptoms besides the keyboard mucking up. All other input sources continue to work, the computer isn't inordinately hot, the video doesn't screw up or crash; at times when I'm doing something that only requires a mouse it will run perfectly fine for an hour or more while this is happening. Even the mouse-nub in the middle of the keyboard still works.
-It does not clear up over time. Only restarts fix it.
-There appears to be no relation between how often this happens and what I have running in the background. Sometimes I've had Firefox with 5+ tabs + an mp3 player + a game running and this won't happen for hours; other times I'm running only a game and close everything else on my computer and it'll happen. And sometimes it'll be the other way around. Tonight I had nothing open except WoW and was closing extraneous processes in the task manager and it was still happening.
-It comes and goes. This hadn't happened to me at all for a while and it suddenly started happening again a couple weeks ago.
Any ideas?
And for the record, no, this has nothing to do with my toilet, this has been happening on and off for at least 9 months. I've asked multiple people and every single one has given me a different answer. The answers vary from the computer simply getting old, the fact that it's a dell and they apparently have shorts in the power supplies, the RAM going bad, a sound driver issue... probably more.
I am on a dell laptop.
Here's what it's doing:
-Every now and then, the keyboard will 'freeze'. When I say freeze, what it does is it refuses to take any input and constantly repeats whatever key I hit last. It will always do this as I hit a key, never when I'm not touching the keyboard. This might seem hard to verify, but I've never come back from not hitting the keyboard, tried to do something, and have it not respond- it always happens as I'm doing something and there's always something visibly going on that's a sign of the repeating input- for instance in an FPS where the repeating key is "A" it forces me to constantly strafe left. ctrl-alt-del doesn't work.
-If I manage to exit the program, the repeated input stops, but the keyboard doesn't unfreeze.
-This usually happens when I have a game of some kind open; this has happened to me in everything to World of Warcraft, Team Fortress, every single source engine game (HL2, HL:source, etc), and even old games like Stronghold: Crusader. This doesn't mean the problem is exclusive to games; a few times it has happened while I'm only typing in a word processor with no programs visibly open on the computer otherwise.
-Restarting the computer fixes the problem and it usually doesn't recur for a while (a day or more). I say usually because on several occasions (including tonight) it constantly happens over and over. This may be related to what I'm doing at the time (tonight I was running an instance in WoW; it was fine before, did this 3 times during the instance, and stopped as soon as I left), or it could simply be sheer random chance.
-There appear to be no other symptoms besides the keyboard mucking up. All other input sources continue to work, the computer isn't inordinately hot, the video doesn't screw up or crash; at times when I'm doing something that only requires a mouse it will run perfectly fine for an hour or more while this is happening. Even the mouse-nub in the middle of the keyboard still works.
-It does not clear up over time. Only restarts fix it.
-There appears to be no relation between how often this happens and what I have running in the background. Sometimes I've had Firefox with 5+ tabs + an mp3 player + a game running and this won't happen for hours; other times I'm running only a game and close everything else on my computer and it'll happen. And sometimes it'll be the other way around. Tonight I had nothing open except WoW and was closing extraneous processes in the task manager and it was still happening.
-It comes and goes. This hadn't happened to me at all for a while and it suddenly started happening again a couple weeks ago.
Any ideas?
Big, honkin' pile of WoW characters
Blackbeard7 wrote: »I think it's hard for someone not to rage at mario kart, while shouting "Fuck you Donkey Kong. Whose dick did you suck to get all those red shells?"
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SC2 NA: exoplasm.519 | PA SC2 Mumble Server | My Website | My Stream
It's still happening. Whatever the problem is, it's not actually being caused by the keyboard- it's just the main symptom.
If it continues on different PS2/USB ports then it is apparently a software issue and you should back everything up and wipe/redo your computer. Actually before you get that far, do spyware and virus scans in case it is some stupid malware.
Or something.
I'll see next time it happens, anyway.
UncleSporky's external keyboard recommendation has merit; in this case, if you test with an external keyboard and it shows no symptoms, the laptop could have a messed up internal ps2/usb port or hub (or whatever the dell laptop keyboard plugs into; sadly, I'm not familiar with their internal workings). Given the ease of testing that as opposed to nuking the whole OS install...I'd probably try that first
PSN: LucidStar_BC
You mentioned melting RAM and I highly doubt you were serious, but a lot of hardware components you can probably rule out. I doubt it is bad RAM, a bad processor, a bad power supply etc. These things manifest their problems in more obvious ways.
Well I just opened it a couple days ago. It has a special plug type I'm not familiar with and plugs directly into one of the boards inside the system.
In any case, if it was the keyboard, the other things that follow the same plug into the system would have also stopped working, wouldn't they?
Since I have this bug going on now, are there any diagnostics I could run with the system live to determine a problem?
If you send in your whole laptop (DON'T send in the hard drive- take it out and hold on to it) they'll either replace the motherboard or the whole laptop. Either way they will fix it for good.
SC2 NA: exoplasm.519 | PA SC2 Mumble Server | My Website | My Stream