Travelmate 7720, 3-key keyboard shortcuts not working?

Hi everybody,

Received my Travelmate 7720 T7300 laptop a couple of days back, and I'm quite happy with the package, apart from the fact that my notebook is having serious trouble handling 3-key keyboard shortcuts. I process documents everyday at work, and I use shortcuts extensively (i.e. selecting words with Ctrl+Shift+arrow keys, etc.) It seems that the Travelmate accepts the shortcut the first time the keys are pressed, but if I were to, say, select five consecutive words, I would have pound the shortcut keys 20 times or so to have the notebook register the keystrokes.

Is this a common feature of Acer notebooks (very hard to believe!), a model-related problem, or, more preferably, am I just stuck with an ill-tempered individual? I love the screen, the numpad and other features of the 7720, but I can't live with a notebook that's shortcut-handicapped.

I'd be very grateful, if other Acer-owners, and especially TM7720 owners, could report if your notebook suffers from the same problem. If you have no such problems, I'm just going to have this swapped for another one, but if this is a model-related thing, then I'm probably going to have to keep searching for another similar laptop from other makers.

Thanks!

 

Could someone owning a new Acer take the time and check their keyboard out... I'd really appreciate it.

Of course I can always head downtown and see if any store happens to carry new travelmates and check it out for myself.

 

Just waiting for the Travelmate 7720G here in Norway, hope for next week than I be back...
Other experience to share?

 

Well, for the money it's hard to beat, but I'd check that your laptop has all the features promised in the specs - some folks have reported that their travelmate is lacking the bluetooth module, and I'm actually waiting for mine to be replaced as well, as it was supposed to have a DVI-D connector. Waiting to hear from the retailer whether they even make these with a DVI-D connector.

Hopefully the keyboard problem gets solved as well. Furthermore I just noticed that my O-key is almost dangling loose.

Oh well, maybe Acer is still struggling with build quality issues, although the laptop does feel quite solid.

 

Hi!

I bought a Travelmate 5520G yesterday. Noticed today that the keyboard only sporadically recognizes the three-key combination of CTRL, SHIFT and an arrow key. CTRL+ALT+arrow key combinations work fine.

If anyone finds a solution to this, please mention it in this thread.

Regards,
Jan Albin

 

OK, problem seems to have been solved.

I just checked the Acer site today for new BIOS updates and it just so happened that there were two new BIOS versions available (1.18 and 1.21). The keyboard issue was already fixed in the 1.18 version, and the fix is naturally also included in the 1.21 version.

After flashing the BIOS the keyboard seems to work fine now!

(Took me some time to figure out that you need to run the flash tool with the special administrator mode available in the context menu in Vista - otherwise it will just give an error message about a sys file. The instructions are nothing short of vague.)

Jan, you might want to try to look for BIOS updates for your specific model!