The keyboard on my laptop just suddenly stopped working, while I was sitting at my desk playing a video game. It’s an Inspiron 2600, with XP home, and Device Manager says the keyboard is working normall, but none of the keys (including the mouse keys) except the off button works anymore.
I called Dell customer support, and the person who answered made me restart with my ethernet cord disconnected, seemed very suprised that that didn’t work, and then wanted to flash the bios. I don’t know much about computers, but I think that’s a pretty drastic step, so I said I didn’t want to try that. She wouldn’t let me talk to her supervisor. Should I try to bios flash, or is that risky? Could there be something wrong with the physical keyboard (pressing F2 to get into setup doesn’t work).
I’m kind of upset and want to cry because I can’t understand half of what she says, and I want to be a good little liberal, but part of me wants to hang up and talk to another tech. I’m on hold now.
Flashing the bios is likely to require keyboard input to run the flashing utility. If the keyboard is completely not working, how does the tech propose to flash the bios?
-lv
Try turning off your laptop and then physically remove the battery from it. Let it sit for a few minutes to drain off any residual power. Then stick the battery back in and reboot. Sometimes a total power down will reset these types of problems.
I don’t know, as soon as she came back I told her I had to go, and hung up. That would have been an interesting question to ask her though.
I called back and talked to another technician. He said it was probably static build-up. He had me take out the battery, disconnect everything, hold the power button down for 20 seconds, then put everything back and restart. It worked! I’m so happy 
Flashing the BIOS isn’t such a bad idea for a hardware issue. Sadly, it rarely solves the problem. Keyboards die. Connections get loose. I would trust the phone support person, he/she spends their days doing this, and they usually have troubleshooting flow charts supplied by Dell that can direct them towards the solution.
Not letting you talk to her supervisor is utter BS. I believe a customer should always be allowed to talk to a supervisor. I would call back and ask to immediatly be transfered to a supervisor, that just seems wrong.
Dell customer support is in Bangalore, India. I have found their English skills to be occaisionly wanting, requiring me to clarify things ad nasium. Be sure they understand your problem fully.
Whiskey, that’s exactly what worked, wish I had seen your post before calling back
Weee!
Okay, so ignore my previous post. Glad you could solve the problem.