G50V-A1 - non-responsive hotkeys

Hi all,

I'm having an issue with the hotkeys on my G50V-A1. Up until roughly 2 weeks ago, they seemed to be working normally (I used the disable-touchpad button almost daily). However now all the hotkey lights are lit, but there is no response when they are pushed. Even when the system is shut down, the ExpressGate key will not boot the system.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled all the ATK software.
I have reinstalled the C++ redistributable.
I have upgraded from BIOS 203 to 207.
I have updated the touchpad driver.

No love so far. I'm not keen on formatting and reinstalling if I can avoid it, though the issue is driving me nuts and I may wind up doing that.

Has anyone had any similar experiences?

 

Can you do a system restore back to 2 weeks ago?

 

Negative. I have filled all my system restore slots up with restore points from uninstalling and reinstalling all the above software.

 

That's interesting. I had this same problem when I installed a new BIOS, but reinstalling all the ATK drivers fixed everything except the Media Centre key (which I don't use). BTW, ExpressGate works when the system is off, it boots into ExpressGate except it complains because I have striped my drives in RAID0 and launches into Windows.

Have you downloaded the newest ATK drivers from the Asus website? I had to do that in order to get everything working properly again.

 

Just to confirm, "all the ATK software" does include:

the ATK drivers
the ATK Generic Function Utility (if present)
the ATK Hotkey utility

right?

Next step would be to try removing and reinstalling them in safe mode.

 

aethelbert - Yep, I did get the ATK software from ASUS' site. I still don't get any response (the buttons used to flash for a second after they'd been hit).

That's correct EBE - I uninstalled and reinstalled those 3 programs, and I also uninstalled and reinsalled the ATK Media app as well.

I'll try it in safe mode and see what I get.

 

I've tried a few more things.

I've redownloaded all the ATK programs (Media, OSD, Generic & Hotkeys) and reinstalled them - no luck. I tried it in safe mode, but you cannot reinstall the .msi programs, because the Windows Installer service won't run in Safe Mode. I reinstalled them all in normal mode - no luck.

I've uninstalled and reinstalled the C++ 2008 redistributable - no love.

I've reinstalled the ITE Remote, Turbo Memory and Direct Console programs. Problem still remains.

I downloaded and tried to reinstall the ExpressGate software, however it fails on install saying that it cannot read the defrag data (it claims there is not enough contiguous space, however I have 30GB free space on my main drive and I just defragged this morning). EDIT - completely uninstalling ExpressGate allowed me to reinstall it successfully - still no hotkey function though.

I also tried manually running the hcontrol.exe file under Program Files (x86)\Asus Utilities\ATK Hotkey. The disk activity went way up for a minute or two, but nothing happened (no system tray icon, no program opening and no hotkey function).

Any more ideas out there?

 

At this point, I can only suggest a complete system recovery using the recovery partition, or the recovery optical media. If that doesn't fix the issue, there is a strong possibility this is a hardware fault (like the switchboard being bad).

In which case, you would need to RMA.

 

Everything seems to be working again now. I'm not 100% sure of the cause, but the buttons started working again after I made some changes to VirtualBox. I changed some of the virtual network adapters and accidentally brushed the disable-mouse soft button and it worked! Perhaps one of those virtual devices had a resource conflict with the soft buttons? I'm not sure - but just wanted to pass the info on.