Please help, my computer goes rogue on me

You are saying that you are standing on a hardwood floor and decide to take your laptop out of your travel case , hmmm? This is a classic hollywood stupid act... you see it all the times!! You would not take a $1000 crystal goblet out of your travel case while standing on a hardwood floor , would you??? Additionally, your laptop is made by Compaq which was swallowed up by HP many years ago, tell me your laptop is already very old and virtually worthless today even before hitting the hardwood floor. Not worth your dime going to the computer shop at all... Too bad, there is nothing to salvage anything out of a laptop for reuse in your next new laptop like you can with a desktop. Perhaps, you can salvage your hard drive and put it in a usb enclosure and recover all the files before it goes on fritz before too long.. Standing on a hardwood floor is the worst place to fool around with a laptop... Next time,,, place your travel case on a table , unzip it or unvelcro it and take out the laptop and place it on the surface. Take away the travel case and all the clutter... ..

Is CNET at its wits' end? Am I seriously expected to give advice to someone who has dropped their laptop, then writes to CNET instead of taking it in for repairs? This is ridiculous - I am happy to help the community solve real problems, but if you drop your laptop/shades/Volkswagen/teeth I'll be happy to help you only at my usual rate. I think this "contribution" is a serious mistake.

Just an idea to try isolate the cause of the problem: try using another keyboard such as a wireless keyboard to see if the problem persists. If it does not it is the keyboard, if it does it may be the keyboard.

Good luck.

I have had the same problem with two Dell CPx machines and one C-610. Various keys would not yield anything, or the wrong character was displayed. In each case, it was a keyboard gone bad. One technician says fine line traces are easily broken on these things (perhaps due to heavy handed typing, or in the case cited a fall to the floor).

I bought one new KB from Dell, got the other two used, all worked just fine after a relatively simple installation. You can get service CDs on eBay for a few dollars showing replacement procedures. If you are in the SF bay area, parts-machines can be found at Wierd Stuff Warehouse, or at the monthly DeAnza college electronic flea market (March-October). Also a good place for laptop power supplies at low prices, but watch out for batteries ... always a crap shoot how good they are.

Bill Carlson

As you have uttered your problem, as per that I can guide something for you. Once I had also faced this problem with my older Desktop Set, as the days goes the micoroparticle as well macros get entry into the keyboard base through the sides of the keys into the soft rubber pad and underside to the sensors. You cant just avoid this. Open your outer cover of the keyboard side by unscrewing the screws, check out for dust or liquid damage or reidues. After that, take out the rubber pad and clean the sensors with help of pure alcohol, never use petroleum products. Then let it dry in normal temp. air. You can use your hair dryer from a long distance so that temp never gets exceeded more than 25 degree celsius. Before assembling check out for free travel of all the keys and ensure they are bouncing back after hittting. If you feel Satisfactory, assemble the kit. In future, try a keyboard instead of your laptop keypad while at home. THis way my problem(almost similar to your current )solved.

I'm not dismissing all the other possible solutions that have been given as all are very feasible, and dropping laptops on the floor is not a good thing at any time, but I think that if it was a hardware fault it would have shown up in a more dramatic way, like actually not working. I would like to add my possible solution. Having had this problem on other machines that were running AVG on them, I eventually found that it was AVG and its background scans that was stopping them and any key presses suddenly appeared after time. Granted this was on somewhat slow machines. After uninstalling AVG I found that the problem was no longer present. I did however re-install AVG and up to now have had no more problems.

first i would try a reboot and and see if that helps if not then you have dislodged a circuit inside you laptop and if you have then you will need a pc repairer for it

Hi Michael, I had the same problem recently. I'm blind (I use the computer with the aid of special talking software)

1/ Press Windows key + E (this opens "My Computer")
2/ Right click c:
3/ Select properties
4/ Select "Tools" tab
5/ Select "Check Now"
6/ Put a tick in both boxes and select "start"
7/ A window will appear telling you disk will be checked next time you restart.
8/ Press Yes and restart machine

hope this works
Bob

This can happen not only as a result of a hardware problem but also because your C drive is perilously close to being full and yet can appear that you have enough space when checked. The root cause is your virual memory swap space varying based on what programs are running at the time. Check your virtual swap file size (recommendation is max size equaling twice the size of physical memory) and lower it a bit for a test. Performance may suffer but if the problem goes away you may find that you just need to clean up your drive, buy a larger one or resize the 'C' to accomodate a larger swap file.

OK, didnt anyone see the part where this person held computer upside down and shook it? Between dropping it on the floor and shaking it upside down (who on earth told you to do that)! Almost guarantees the hard drive is destroyed. It would be worth the time and effort to buy a new hard drive and install and then go from there. The worst that can happen is you will have a spare hard drive.

I recently worked on a Compaq V2424NR which had an occasionally repeating key. It was very difficult to type anything when the "i"key was repeating. Usually I could press the backspace key to get it to stop repeating but then it would just start again. Sometimes it would not happen and then I could type words. I tried reinstalling the operating system thinking that was the problem, but my attempts ended in failure. Finally, I got on e-bay and found a keyboard that was made for that model and replaced the keyboard on the laptop. That made all the difference in the world and the laptop was useful once again. I would suggest that you try this. It will cost you a few bucks but that is far cheaper than buying a new unit. I suspect that the laptop I was working on had been dropped also, because of the way one corner sat up a bit too high. The user did not know if this was the case. However, the new keyboard worked great. I found directions online that showed me a step by step procedure for removing the old keyboard and installing the new one.

Good luck.

I've seen the little keyboard pointer cause rogue cursor action and I wouldn't be surprised if it caused strange keypresses also after dropping the computer. Try disabling it (usually it's somewhere in the mouse properties) and see if that helps.

This is a common problem since Vista and the 2008 election campaign. You might think that something radical is needed, such as ObamaCare. Not so. The cure is reformat (low level) and reinstall (clean). I know, that is ugly, but if you do so, you will eliminate all possible software related causes. You will discover that Office 2007 is mishandling your keyboard and, possibly, your mouse too. Test the system thoroughly before reinstalling Office 2007, then test again after the DVD install and again after all the SPs and patches are on. Why would an Office suite change the way the keyboard and mouse are handled by the OS? Microsoft, need I say more?

If you think this is too wry to be real, you probably think that your laptop runs slower after you install antivirus software because it is now so mellow. Feel free to live the dream.

mess around with your keyboard driver. if that doesnt solve the problem i believe you have a bad keyboard buffer chip.

eh buddy, jus checking this thread so i hope i can help if you havent been sorted out yet. i think your problem is your keyboard. dont know if you are familiar with removing the keyboard but if you can then remove rhe screws and unplug your keyboard then use a usb r ps2 external keyboard. once it works fine then jus replace your old keyboard with a new one. you can order online. now if you have the same prob then you are back 2 square 1 only diff you know its not the keyboard so then u take it 2 da hospital. lemme know if that works

This is common with MS Office 2007 / Outlook 2007. MS has catalogued this in the KB but I don?t currently have the article number.

I have found that this behavior is aggravated by both anti-malware programs and by IE 7/8 RS feed synchronization.

To prove that it is an RSS/Outlook issue disable RSS feed synchronization in both Outlook (if used) and IE7/8 (if enabled). Go to you profile ?temp? folder and delete all files. Restart Outlook 007. The problem should go away. Re-enabling feed sync will cause the issue to reappear.

As far as I know there has been no fix for this issue posted by Microsoft. I now run with RSS feed sync set to once per day and do no experience this issue.

I suspect that any program that places a large number of ?.tmp? files in the ?temp? folder will also cause this to happen. MS says it is due to OUTLB.EXE (an Outlook 2007 utility) scanning these items when present.

This fixed my battle with this issue. Hope it helps your situation.

Here are some threads supportive of this issue:

http://forums.techarena.in/ms-office-support/951089.htm

Hi mate,

it's bad to hear that you DROP your notebook, but if your notebook do have a DOCKING or have an external Keyboard/Mouse then try to connect it first to see what's going on... if both are seems working fine, than that's the keyboard/mouse, if still have problem... then it really seems your Hard Disk or Motherboard have problem, try to do a scandisk/defrag ...etc. check if any bad sectors, still problem not solve.... better buy a NEW ONE instead of fixing the old one, buy a HD console to reuse your Notebook's old HD, and maybe consider this Notebook connect to your TV as a better-than-normal DVD player...

have fun~~

Cheers,
Dennis

I'm an HP field engineer. The NC6400 is a business class notebook and very durable. I would suspect the software first. Something could be stealing too many cpu cycles. If when you dropped it the laptop was on, immediately replace the hard drive whether you see issues or not. It is a no brainer that some part of the drive is damaged. No laptop is designed to with stand this type of shock with the hard drive spinning. As far as the keyboard itself, it would have to have a direct hit in the fall to get damaged. This is an area of the hardware that is very durable and does not break unless liguid is spilled on it. Lastly, the touch pad gets alot of use and is integrated into the bus with the keyboard if the buttons are well used I would replace it as it anyway. The NC6400 can take up to 4GB of ram and the CPU is upgrade capable. I'd think its worth the investment.

Maybe you've downloaded files from Sarah Palin's web site. Maybe your computer thinks that big government simply isn't the answer, and instead of government death panels, we need to drill baby, drill.

Well, with a sudden impact such as the laptop hitting the floor, I'd suspect that something may have gotten a tad bit loose. Could be memory, an internal cable connector, cpu... Without somebody actually opening it up and examining your laptop it would be just guessing and speculation.

I am not sure if computers is covered in her book, though.

Most likely when you dropped the computer the shock caused a solder on the keyboard - computer interface to go bad imitating what is called a "cold solder." Take it to a hardware shop to fix - chances are they have seen this problem before.

Difficult one to answer but doubt if it is a virus or any kind of software problem. Sounds like a hardware fault to me either the hard disk drive has suffered some damage when you dropped the laptop or something got shaken partially loose and is causing the intermittent problem. If you feel confident enough in opening up the machine you could do a check on connections etc. though laptops are more difficult to work on than desktops due to their compact nature. I think you may have to bite the bullet and get a qualified computer guy to look at it.

Sorry to be so long in replying, but here goes(at last).
First a big "Thank You!" to all who made time to respond with some great suggestions.
I ran lots of scans, as mentioned before, to no avail.
So I pulled off the keyboard, checked the plug. It looked fine, though I unplugged it, re-inserted the plug and tried typing again, with no positive effect.
While looking at the back of the keyboard I did find what appeared to be debris contamination showing. The result, I think, of a recently acquired bad habit of eating near my open laptop.
I ordered and installed a new keyboard and all those troubles have gone away.
Thank you again to all who took valuable time to offer suggestions

try to use an usb keyboard to see if that works and try to reinstall your O.S. So you will see if you have or not problems with your operating system eventually try to install another anti-virus:http://www.avast.com

Plug in an external USB keyboard, use it, and see if the PC goes rogue once a day. Sounds keyboard-related to me.