Keyboard Problem, Please Help

Hello all,

Im writing because of a problem that Ive been encountering ever since buying my new DELL laptop a month and a half ago. It is an Inspiron 6400 (2 gb ram, Core 2 Duo, Vista Home Premium etc...) and overall it has been very good, giving me very little problems. The first thing I did when I got it was reformat it (to get rid of all those pesky DELL programs), and then install the newest drivers from DELL and ATIs website.

Since Ive got it though Ive been noticing a slight problem with my keyboard thats driving me crazy. My keyboard works fine, but after having a program opened for about half an hour, it begins to malfunction ONLY inside that program. Keys start producing symbols that they usually do not produce.

For example, this problem is happening RIGHT now inside Firefox (note that in Notepad it always works fine, it seems to happen with programs that use a lot of Ram).

If I press the question mark inside Firefox it produces this: É.
If I press the apostrophe it produces this: è.
If I press the square brackets it produces this: ^ç.
If I press the curly brackets it produces this: ¨Ç
If I press the tags used to enclose HTML it produces this: '"
If I press the forward and backward slash it produces this: éà

There are a few more although these are the ones that really bug me. It only happens in certain programs (Dreamweaver, photoshop, firefox, visual studio 2005 etc...) and the problem only goes on in certain programs at the same time. For example if I open Dreamweaver right now the keyboard will work fine, even if its messed up in firefox. After about half an hour it will start to malfunction in Dreamweaver too. Right now I have to close my programs every half an hour to be able to use them properly, something that Im not happy about.

If anyone could provide any advice or help, or has encountered this problem previously and know how to fix it please, your help will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Akashic

 

On thing like this I had was due to a long island ice tea in the keyboard. What can I say, recipe for disaster ... mix a glass of booze, a notebook, a cell phone, a playstation control, one lap, and 2 hands.

A keyb uses a keymap to tell this button equals that symbol. I think there is a way to have different/custom keymaps for different programs. I am going to look around a bit and will post later ... or maybe someone who uses a non-english keymap can post up.

Anyway I will prolly reply in a little bit or tomorrow(going to bed soon).

 

I would check the Regional and Language settings in Control Panel. The country selected under regional options will affect how information is displayed and the Details button on the Languages page will allow you to select the input language and keyboard. Check that all of these are correct.

John

 

What John said, then you can also pull up and check the character set itself in case it got corrupted.

More info here

I would also check the software for the correct language selection. After that, maybe try reinstalling software.

 

Hello all,

Thanks for your help.

I went to my keyboard settings, and verified that it was set to the US standard (I checked the key mapping to make sure it's correct). I then went through some other key mappings and found that when my keyboard gets messed up it's using the Canadian Multilingual keyboard settings. Somehow the settings are being switched for certain programs while I'm using them.

I removed several input languages, and left only US, to see if that would solve the problem. I'll test it out and will report my findings tonight.

If that doesn't work I'll give the link you provided a try.

Regards,
Akashic

 

Brilliant. That solved it for me too. I'd been wondering why it occasionally changes, for no apparent reason, to US mapping. Alt+left shift tapped it on.

The pest is now gone.

Absolutely marvelous.

 

Hello Keizafk,

I'm glad the problem was solved for you, and as far as I can tell it's solved for me too. I'm 100% sure that the problem wasn't a result of me pressing Alt + left shift, but removing it from the options has certainly fixed it.

Thanks everyone, I'm glad to say I've fixed this problem and a Windows Mobile Sync problem in one day .

Regards,
Akashic

 

NP

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