Acer Aspire 6920 keyboard mulfunctioning

I bought an Acer Aspire 6920 in 2008 with Vista Home Premium preinstalled, but recently have been having keyboard malfunctions. It began about a year ago or so. The initial problem was that after the keyboard would not function at all after coming back from sleep mode, a quick restart would correct the problem. Now, however, the problem is that certain keys output wrong values (i.e. if i press letter 'l' output is zero '0', 'm' is '3', etc. Most keys produce desired output including the numeric keys, but some do not and this is a problem. I ran the latest Norton updated antivirus which produced not visible viruses to speak of. I feel that this may be a BIOS problem, yet the only thing that I have updated recently is the Windows Live. Other than that nothing has changed. Please advise...

 

Remove the virus called Norton and see if the problem persists. (Seriously).

 

I have been using Norton Internet Security Suite since 2007 and have it on my other PCs with no ill effects.

 

While an almost 5 year old system could certainly be having hardware problems (how hard are you on your keyboards - how much do you use your system a day?) this is not related to the BIOS, nor is software/drivers out of the question (as a possible solution).

Buy some DeOxit and clean the contacts where the keyboard plugs into the system and if the problem still persists; consider that the very toxic (to Windows) AV program you're so fond of isn't above these kind of issues (consider yourself lucky so far...). Not saying that it is the problem: but that is where I would start if I let NAV anywhere near my machines.

To test the hardware outside of your specific install - download a Ubuntu 'Live' CD and see if the problems persist there.

Good luck.

 

I use it a couple of times a week for about 2-3 hours or so. I am not hard on my keys and never where and I do clean the computer regularly. I will try to clean it again to see if that solves the problem. Would you recommend anti-spam software like Ad-aware or some other free anti-spam products to try and see if this is related to malware or some other key-intercept virus, etc.? Why in your opinion is NAV so bad? One thing that annoys me about in the last version is that the whole suite is disabled after one year subscription expires, and not just the 'updates' component. Lately I am contemplating changing to a different suite. Which is better McAfee, Kaspersky, or some other AV suite for protection?

 

No AV you pay for is worth anything: I run MSE (and common sense) on my machines with zero issues and the least performance hit on my systems.

With MSE (and I'm sure with any other AV product) it is not recommended to run multiple av-type programs on the same system - they can and do interfere with each other.

As for NAV being so bad? When a product uses proprietary (instead of MS-recommended) hooks into the O/S it is supposedly trying to protect; very bad things happen (stability/reliability/performance -wise...).