Weird spaces/backspaces for no reason

[JannyB]

I bought a Dell Latitude E4300 a couple of years ago, refurbished, and I've had intermittent typing problems with it. The most common is that when I'm typing, for no reason whatsoever, the keyboard will act as if I've backspaced or tabbed and it will skip to a totally different part of the text. I have to constantly go back and take out characters from a word I think I'm typing HERE but which shows up, say, back in the middle of the word "skip" in this text. (It just did that very thing...started to type the rest of "started" in the middle of "just.") It's always done a little of this, and at first I thought it was a problem with Word...but now it does the same thing ALL THE TIME. Any way I can fix this, or is a new machine the only answer?

 

[USAFRet]

1. Make sure your hand isn't accidentally brushing the touchpad. I have a HP that does that.
2. Clean the gunk from under the keyboard.

Extreme fix: Replace the keyboard.

 

[dextermat]

Hi,

Probably a refurbish that had water in it and it shorted the keyboard or mobo . If you try with a usb keyboard, does it do that ?

 

[JannyB]

Don't have a USB keyboard, so that'd be a tough option to try. I'm trying to keep "gunk" out of the keyboard as much as possible...since it's always had this problem, I suspect the reurbish did originally have something happen to it. I'll see what I can do cleaning-wise....Thanks!