Mike has a problem with some of the keys on his laptop keypad not working after bravely letting his son bash around on it for a bit!
My first reaction is that it might be beyond repair as they can be delicate enough and not meant to be played with by children! I shouldn’t give out to you as I might find it hard to beat my own child away from my precious things soon enough!
Anyway, heres a few possible solutions. If nothing was spilled on the keys then it may just be a key or 2 that got stuck down permanently so have a look at all of them closely to make sure they are all at the same level. Look across the keys at your eyeline to make this easier to spot. You may be able to prise them back up if any are compressed.
A connection may have come loose which will require keyboard or maybe whole laptop dismantling but there are usually guides on how to do this on your laptop manufacturer’s website. Some makes are easier to take apart than others. Hopefully the connection will be easy to spot.
Get a can of compressed air and give the keyboard a good blasting in case its a piece of dirt messing things up.
Here’s one slightly obtuse thing to try, make sure you give the laptop a good scan with a spyware program on the remote chance that you have some weird key-logging virus. Maybe uninstall and re-install or update the keyboard drivers while you’re at that.
Finally, if you need to get it fixed, try getting a new usb keyboard instead to save money or maybe one of those holographic, virtual keyboards I spotted on Roomraiders on MTV recently!
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8 Responses to “Laptop Keypad not Working”
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May 12th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Hi Leon
Thanks for the suggestions. When it first happened among the first things I tried was the full scan for nasties, all OK. I tried checking also if keys were stuck – but they seemed OK – it was strange really that the keystrokes that were appearing on screen were not really repeating – more like little spurts of random nonsense, and only on some keys over on the left hand side of the keyboard – a few keys were still working OK, but unfortunately not enough to be usable…
I ended up whizzing to Carrick and buying and attaching a USB keyboard and that worked fine, so at least we’re able to use the machine again.
But that makes me think too that it’s probably a connection inside somewhere – am a bit reluctant to try taking it to bits at the moment – just in case it gets worse.
Hopefully Mrs A. will be getting a new desktop PC at some point so when thats all up and running I’ll get the screwdriver out on the laptop!
thanks again for the very helpful suggestions,
and yes – probably best not to let toddlers hammer away at computers..!
cheers
Mike
June 11th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
We saw that on a couple of workstations and went nuts trying to figure out what it was – turned out (LOL) that the user had accidentally enabled speech recognitiion in the O/S – it’s available in XP and later – and the condenser mike was picking up background noise and trying to make words up in various applications.
June 23rd, 2009 at 6:53 pm
This is a great wp theme – did you do it yourself? If not, could you let me know who did? I’d be interested. Perhaps you would be interested in making me one for my blog?
June 23rd, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Half did it. Not able to build themes from scratch yet but will soon hopefully. At the minute I can only change existing themes.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
[...] regard to the Laptop Keypad not Working post, I’ve heard of spyware causing keys to stop working, so a good malware scan might be [...]
June 24th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
More info on this problem here – http://www.pcproblems.ie/keypads-and-spyware/
September 4th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
With the decrease in price of acceptable laptops i tend to think of them as throw away items now and buy a new budget one every year!
July 5th, 2011 at 12:20 pm
Well sometimes some virus in the system cause such problems, I would suggest to first get your system scanned and make sure there are no viruses….You can also try to use Microsoft Virtual keyboard or buy some USB cable keyboard for your laptop