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USB Keyboard problem....

bigrad

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Posted June 13, 2011 at 10:28PM

My Vista laptop keyboard has become very tatty over the years so I plugged in a USB keyboard so I could actually see which key was which. The USB keyboard works fine but the trouble is that now the laptop keys themselves just produce completely wrong characters when you hit them. It makes no difference whether the USB keyboard is plugged in or not. I have tried restoring but it refuses to co operate and simply reports an "Unspecified error" and changes nothing. Is there an obvious answer to this? I was planning to un-install the keyboard driver to see what happened, but I cant find it. Any help would be appreciated. Cheers.

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bigrad

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Posted June 13, 2011 at 11:14PM

Well I tried last good config - no effect

Running in safe mode - no effect

F12 / F8 work as advertised

No CDs of any sort supplied with laptop, so haven't tried that. No idea what Puppy Linux is. Sorry.

Just seems so weird that what amounts to a USB peripheral would knock over the inbuilt keyboard.

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bigrad

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Posted June 13, 2011 at 11:22PM

I have just checked device manager and it reports all keyboard devices working properly - which they're not obviously!

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chub_tor

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Posted June 14, 2011 at 1:00PM

If you have found the keyboard in Device Manager then you can right click it, unistall, delete the driver and let Windows find it again by going to New Hardware Search or re-boot.

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bigrad

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Posted June 14, 2011 at 5:19PM

I did think about deleting and reinstalling the driver but I was concerned that if it was reported as working OK I might make things worse if there was a deeper problem by deleting it and then it fail to reinstall itself. In the end I booted up in F8 and did a system restore from the checkpoint the day before using the offered recovery menu, which worked and put everything back as it should be. I don't know why this worked when a system restore from within a fully loaded Windows didn't, nor do I know what caused the actual problem to occur in the 1st place,apart from the fact that it was clearly related to using a USB keyboard, but there you go. Thanks for everyone's input.

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chub_tor

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Posted June 15, 2011 at 9:00AM

Glad that you got it working again and thanks for posting the fix.

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