- Mar 15, 2016
- 2
- 0
- 1,520
SPECS:
OS: WIN 10 Home 64-bit
CPU: Intel Core i5-4210H @ 2.90 GHz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M 2GB
RAM: 8GB
MB: Acer Aspire VN7-791
Hello, I've decided to post here to try to gather a reasonable understanding on what happened to my laptop as of last night.
Last night as I returned to my dormitory after a day away, I noticed my laptop was on while the lid was down; i.e - I sent it to sleep a day ago and it seemed to have woken up by itself. This did not concern me much apart from the charging cycles I may be wasting, and this has happened a few days earlier as well. However, what did concern me was when I clicked past the lock screen and tried to enter my password, my keyboard seemed to not be responding. In a frantic attempt to gain access to my computer, I tried out pressing the numlock, capslock, ctrl+alt+delete, and none of them appeared to have any response on my screen at all, when normally a special key notification would pop up.
After I restarted my laptop (the mouse still worked fine) and managed to log in (I set my login screen to not require a password to log in when turning on), I noticed my keyboard was still off, and tried to figure out which keys still worked.
I downloaded SharpKeys and tried to change my key bindings, but many of them showed strange bindings, such as:
- Pressing 'S' on my keyboard resulted in 'scroll lock' function;
- Num pad '9' resulted in 'Q' function;
- 'I' resulted in '$' function (even without holding shift);
- Some keys even input the same function as another;
and a majority of the other keys appeared to have no response at all, so I couldn't just simply remap everything back to normal.
Worst of all, when I tried to enter BIOS to reset the BIOS settings, the keyboard was still whacky, so at this point I was pretty sure this wasn't a software issue related to Windows 10 (eg - sticky keys, filter keys etc. etc.).
After much frustration, I borrowed a bluetooth keyboard, which managed to work perfectly, and is what I'm currently using to type out this forum post. This further reinforced the idea that something must be wrong at a hardware level.
Now, my laptop is still under warranty, so I'm planning to send it off to a service center to fix in the next few days, but I'm more curious as to what caused this immensely frustrating issue.
I speculate that it may be static in the circuitry, or unstable current in the socket, as my roommate appears to have issues with his rig as well, but is a laptop susceptible to such effects? I was under the impression that the laptop charger would regulate current flow to the laptop, or am I wrong in thinking so? Furthermore, other components of the laptop appears to be perfectly fine (graphics, HDD, peripherals (Logitech G502)...), so does this mean the keyboard controller is especially susceptible to unstable current?
I also speculate that perhaps latent power in the circuits was causing the whacky inputs, but I couldn't open the chassis of my laptop to discharge the circuits(2 screws that won't budge), so that solution was out of reach. Also, the keys that were messed up appeared to be constant despite frequent rebootings, which leads me to believe that latent power might not be the problem here, and the problem may be more permanent. Will this affect my warranty?
What do you guys think? Thanks in advance.
EDIT: I'm contemplating a system refresh, but that would mean losing all my installed programs, which would be a pain to reinstall. I don't have any system restore points..
OS: WIN 10 Home 64-bit
CPU: Intel Core i5-4210H @ 2.90 GHz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M 2GB
RAM: 8GB
MB: Acer Aspire VN7-791
Hello, I've decided to post here to try to gather a reasonable understanding on what happened to my laptop as of last night.
Last night as I returned to my dormitory after a day away, I noticed my laptop was on while the lid was down; i.e - I sent it to sleep a day ago and it seemed to have woken up by itself. This did not concern me much apart from the charging cycles I may be wasting, and this has happened a few days earlier as well. However, what did concern me was when I clicked past the lock screen and tried to enter my password, my keyboard seemed to not be responding. In a frantic attempt to gain access to my computer, I tried out pressing the numlock, capslock, ctrl+alt+delete, and none of them appeared to have any response on my screen at all, when normally a special key notification would pop up.
After I restarted my laptop (the mouse still worked fine) and managed to log in (I set my login screen to not require a password to log in when turning on), I noticed my keyboard was still off, and tried to figure out which keys still worked.
I downloaded SharpKeys and tried to change my key bindings, but many of them showed strange bindings, such as:
- Pressing 'S' on my keyboard resulted in 'scroll lock' function;
- Num pad '9' resulted in 'Q' function;
- 'I' resulted in '$' function (even without holding shift);
- Some keys even input the same function as another;
and a majority of the other keys appeared to have no response at all, so I couldn't just simply remap everything back to normal.
Worst of all, when I tried to enter BIOS to reset the BIOS settings, the keyboard was still whacky, so at this point I was pretty sure this wasn't a software issue related to Windows 10 (eg - sticky keys, filter keys etc. etc.).
After much frustration, I borrowed a bluetooth keyboard, which managed to work perfectly, and is what I'm currently using to type out this forum post. This further reinforced the idea that something must be wrong at a hardware level.
Now, my laptop is still under warranty, so I'm planning to send it off to a service center to fix in the next few days, but I'm more curious as to what caused this immensely frustrating issue.
I speculate that it may be static in the circuitry, or unstable current in the socket, as my roommate appears to have issues with his rig as well, but is a laptop susceptible to such effects? I was under the impression that the laptop charger would regulate current flow to the laptop, or am I wrong in thinking so? Furthermore, other components of the laptop appears to be perfectly fine (graphics, HDD, peripherals (Logitech G502)...), so does this mean the keyboard controller is especially susceptible to unstable current?
I also speculate that perhaps latent power in the circuits was causing the whacky inputs, but I couldn't open the chassis of my laptop to discharge the circuits(2 screws that won't budge), so that solution was out of reach. Also, the keys that were messed up appeared to be constant despite frequent rebootings, which leads me to believe that latent power might not be the problem here, and the problem may be more permanent. Will this affect my warranty?
What do you guys think? Thanks in advance.
EDIT: I'm contemplating a system refresh, but that would mean losing all my installed programs, which would be a pain to reinstall. I don't have any system restore points..
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