All of a sudden this morning, my Dell laptop touchscreen decided to no longer recognize the ALT + D keyboard shortcut to jump the cursor to the address bar in the browsers. Any idea on how to fix that issue?
Thanks in advance!
I assume you’ve tried the basics, such as rebooting? 
Thanks for the response.
Yes. I did. That created a new issue: the right ALT key decided it was no longer working.
And all of a sudden, both issues are resolved. I really hate it when mechanical issues “resolve on their own”. I mean, I’m happy they’re resolved, but machines should not work that way.
Sounds like gremlins.
I’m fairly certain I had not spilled water on the thing.
From a troubleshooting POV you’ve actually learned something very useful there.
Whenever a keyboard starts getting flaky, and especially if it’s one of the twofer keys (Shift, Ctrl, or Alt) it’s first going to manifest as a failure of whichever TwoferKey + [whatever key] you use most often.
Now you know not to blame the browser or the OS. And to be on guard for any and every RightAlt+[whatever] you press. IOW RightAlt+D and RightAlt +Q are now equally flaky. But if you don’t use RightAlt+Q very much, you’ll probably never notice that flakiness.
Keyboards and mouse buttons are the last parts of a modern computer that are moving parts. And are exposed to the grunge of hair, skin, falling crumbs, etc. So they’re inherently the least reliable components. Or at least the components which are most subject to chance failures induced from the outside.
A good cleaning with compressed air might help if the problem is grunge in there. But if not it’s time to consider replacement; true hardware glitches never self-heal.
As a general matter replacing the keyboard in a laptop is fiddly work, but not difficult work. For any popular model you’ll find more than one Youtube doing a step-by-step on the process. And replacement keyboards are readily available for cheap from e.g. Amazon. I’ve swapped laptop keyboards on several machines and had good success.
Good luck!
One thing to check is that no other keys are somehow being pressed. Maybe give each key a few good whacks to make sure there isn’t some internal part that is being pressed.
The reason that other keys are important is due to the way keyboards are wired. To save wiring complexity and reduce the number of required pins on the controller chip, keyboards share certain components between keys, and this leads keyboards to have what’s called a “rollover” limit. This means that not all combinations of keys can be detected independently.
The rollover rules are variable but manufacturers generally try to make common combinations work, while certain uncommon combinations might not. So for instance ScrollLock+Alt+D could conceivably not work, since ScrollLock is a rare key to begin with. If it’s stuck down, it might impede other combinations. I had a recent problem with the input switch buttons on my keyboard, where I couldn’t type (as I recall) Ctrl-Z or Ctrl-K, because these interfered with the stuck button.
An older keyboard had an annoying problem that T would not be registered if I was holding down shift-R already. This meant that typing “ART” or something often came through as “AR”, because when typing fast I might not let up on R before hitting T.
Anyway, LSLGuy’s suggestions are good. Check for crud, clean with compressed air, maybe even just hold upside-down and give a good shake. And especially make sure no keys are stuck.
All good advice. Thanks! Tonight, I’ll do some quick keyboard maintenance on it to suck out all the gunk that’s managed to get beneath the keys.
No, no, I’m pretty sure @Seanette is referring to the 1970s American Motors vehicle.
Has your laptop been near one recently?
mmm