My girlfriend was over today, using my computer for her work, while I was at work. She was entering some things into forms areas on a website, and while she was typing, some other letters started to show up as well, so she had to backspace to delete them.
Then, she was looking away (I think) and looked back and in one of the fields was the text, “the man”. Then a couple times, the word “if” showed up. Then, while she was looking at a field and not touching the keyboard, she actually saw “if if” get typed in. Then she was typing an email, and when she scrolled back up to fill in the subject line, “if if” was already in the subject.
I’ve done a full scan in safe mode for viruses and trojans and such. Using up-to-date Norton AV. Also have Zonealarm as a firewall. Don’t know where this extra text and phrases and words came from. I’m using it just fine without extra letters, so I dunno what’s going on.
If it’s WinXP, there is a speech-to-text app, whose name escapes me at the moment, that can get enabled on accident. It’s under(I think) Control Panel->Accessibility Options. If you don’t have a microphone installed, it just picks up white noise and so it’s output is essentially random stuff. If you think about it, repeating “if’s” sounds a lot like white noise.
Also, I have a user at work whose PC speakers(probably from soundcard mic-in) picks up the signal from the local landfill’s handheld radios. Not sure how that happens but it is plain as day(I know one of the guys who works there and recognized his voice). This effect is very intermittent, and I got lucky to catch it when I did, but it is very wierd, that could feed a text-to-speech program with random stuff too.
So check the text-to-speech stuff, and remember you don’t necessarily need a mic for the soundcard to pick up something, even if it’s interference.
Or what Duderdude2 said, flashes of light from the right lightsource might mess with an IR keyboard.
There are certain “hot-keys” that will do things like “display the last word I erased”. Maybe that hot-key is flaky on your keyboard, or the way your friend types, she taps that hot-key ever so slightly, unintentionally.
I know there is some hot-key I hit by mistake on my text editor that causes it to “backup things” when I don’t intend to. I still haven’t figured out what it’s backing up, or where too.
Have you ever spilled beer into your computer? I accidentally spilled beer on my laptop keyboard (which is of course right on top of the computer guts) and my computer was typing all sorts of weird stuff, some of it all by itself. It took a while before it got straightened out again.
I use 2000, not XP. I had been using the computer that morning, no problems. There’s no wireless involved anywhere. I don’t have any remote login software. The sites she was using, she uses on a regular basis and they have never caused this problem. My computer is a teetotaller. I can’t be certain that my computer was NOT built on top of an ancient Patrick Swayze burial site. Iceland_Blue, if you’ve really taken over my computer, please type overt threats or something…it’s the wondering about what “if…if…if the man” means that’s killing us.
