Laptop strangness ?

Jon_01

Hi everyone,

I've had an Acer laptop for about 18 months, no problems.
Last week started to get an odd failure of the keyboard, had to hit the same key 2 or 3 times to get it to respond. This got worse and I thought an XP driver had corrupted, had no luck reinstalling the driver so reinstalled XP clean... and that when things got strange...

XP installs fine until I hit the part where you have to input your name and password (the bit just before it want's the CD key), no response from the keyboard at all, so no way to continue.

Dropped to dos, keyboard works fine ?
Loaded a winpe toolkit, keyboard works fine ??
Loaded Linux live CD, keyboard works fine (although it stops on the detecting pulg and pay head ware for about 5 minutes ?)... I can't use Linux full time as there are no drivers for the wifi and the software from work is windows only...

I've tried 3 different versions of XP, the home editions the system comes with, no kb.
A version of XP pro from work, no keyboard.
and a version of Vista from a desktop system, again, no kb ???

I've downloaded an unattended XP install from the net (yes, I know I shouldn't, but I needed to test an idea). That completes with, still, no kb working BUT when I boot into safe mode the kb does work !!!

I've reset the bios to safe defaults, no change. I've run every dos level hard ware testing tool I've got and they all say there's nothing wrong with the system ??

And it's all the hard ware buttons, even the power button won't work. Also in windows it won't shut down, clicking on the turn off icon on the start bar just hangs the system and I have to pull the battery and the mains lead.
All XP progs work (that don't need a kb), again tools show no problems !

Anyone have a suggestion or see what I've missed ??

Many thanks

bookduck

Interesting, do you want the data on the disk, if not totally erase/wipe the disk, fdisk and start again.

How about a bios upgrade? How about special drivers for your lappy?

jaydeeuk1

Really strange error... I can only think of two possible causes. Either the bios has become partially corrupt in which case a bios update might resolve things, or there is a hardware fault with the keyboard/motherboard caused possibly by heat. I'm not an OS programmer, but the way windows processes inputs from the keyboard may be different to the way linux does. Is it a works laptop? I'd try borrowing the keyboard from an identical unit and see if that makes a difference.

Jon_01

bookduck wrote: »

Interesting, do you want the data on the disk, if not totally erase/wipe the disk, fdisk and start again.

How about a bios upgrade? How about special drivers for your lappy?

I've deleted the partition and stated again, formated with fat 32 and NT, no change.
I've tested the drive with a number of dos disc tool all the partition and logical drives pass every test I run on them.

I'm looking for a bios upgrade now. No driver needed for the keyboard and the system won't even run the kb with the restore xp reinstall from the recovery partition which put's it back to factory...

Jon_01

jaydeeuk1 wrote: »

Really strange error... I can only think of two possible causes. Either the bios has become partially corrupt in which case a bios update might resolve things, or there is a hardware fault with the keyboard/motherboard caused possibly by heat. I'm not an OS programmer, but the way windows processes inputs from the keyboard may be different to the way linux does. Is it a works laptop? I'd try borrowing the keyboard from an identical unit and see if that makes a difference.

I'm looking for a bios upgrade now.
It's my own but don't have a kb I can try.
I'll thinking of a strip down to see if there's something obvious happened to the mail board.

One thing that I've just found thats a little odd. I've run a system monitor through XP and it's showing a cpu usage of between 63% and 72%. With nothing running the idle % used to be 3% to 5% ? So XP's trying to do something but nothing odd is showing up in task manager ? It can't be a virus, I've reformatted the drive every time I've reinstalled and haven't used the same version of XP twice !!

fwor

Are you using the native XP drivers for the motherboard, or have you downloaded the latest mobo chipset drivers from the Acer website? If not the latter, would be worth trying.

Jon_01

fwor wrote: »

Are you using the native XP drivers for the motherboard, or have you downloaded the latest mobo chipset drivers from the Acer website? If not the latter, would be worth trying.

Good point, but I've used the Acer restore util and that takes an image from a hidden partition and rewrites the C drive back to factory defaults, drivers and all and that doesn't get the kb working (apart from in safe mode ??)...

banger9365

plug a usb keyboard in to it and try that ,if works uninstall the keyboard driver and download a new one from acer and install ,my moneys on a bad driver if it works with every think else
and do it in that order

Jon_01

Don't have a usb kb, but have tried uninstalling the kb and reinstalling (Acer don't offer a kb driver on their site for this model). No luck, and to be honest, considering I've used 3 versions of windows so far (2 of which I've used on this laptop before without a single problem), I can't see that it's a driver going bad...

Anyone know how to reflash the bios on an Aspire ? I've got the file but there no info on the Acer site on how to flash it !

startrekker

I think that in the empowering technology utility there is an esettings management program that will let you update the bios, which may help, before you start flashing............worth a look....... in fact just spotted a bit of tutorial HERE on a blog

oldagetraveller

Have you done the obvious and asked Acer? It's only 18 months old for goodness sake!