My keyboard seems to have remapped itself. Ï have no idea what happened. Most keys are fine, but some are wonky. Let’s see. The alphabet is fine:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
My “enter” key is messed up, giving me this:<
<
<
<
The backspace key is screwed up, only moving the cursor back rather than deleting. The “delete” key doesn’t do anything. Other keys are messed up or not seemingly at random. The apostrophe gives me an apostrop’he, but in the wr’ong place, first jumping back a bit before inserting it. Like that. Its all screwy. See those apostrophes back there?
I’ve checked every keyboard and language setting up, down and twice over. No dice. I’ve rebooted, and turned my PC off and on again, then had a panic attack since I could no longer type my PC’s password correctly (I know, I’m an idiot, I should have realized), before discovering the on-screen keyboard. Phew! Anyway, still messed up.
And I know this post looks coherent. There was some cutting, pasting and loud cursing involved. Apologies for any apostrophes in weird places. Or these: <
So, any ideas? This is basically ruining my whole lifestyle at the moment.
You do have my sympathy. Awhile back I had to use the kindle for online stuff. It was okay for reading…but gawd posting anything on the net? The spell checker was like some autistic Eskimo on crack. A few of post here at the time are probably something for the ages.
Oh, the reason for THAT is that IIRC the story correctly, somebody at his workplace remapped the bosses keyboard…so that when the boss typed a certain word/phrase it was replaced with “let’s go to the quarry and throw shit down there”…some/much hillarity ensued…or something like that.
First place it is very unlikely to be the keyboard itself, but the software that interprets it. Just a week ago my wife complained to me that some key was wonky, I forget the details. I told her to reboot and all was well.
It’s useful for you to share such details as that this is the internal keyboard on a notebook computer. It might be useful if you were also to share the exact model of the computer.
What I would suggest is going into the BIOS and test the keyboard there, if possible. Does it behave in the same way? If not, then the weird keyboard mapping is probably something in the OS. If you can’t test it in the BIOS, do you have a Linux Live CD you can boot from?
As a workaround if it is a hardware issue you can plug in a wired or wireless USB keyboard and keep working. I’m assuming you rebooted your machine before posting this.
Windows lets you customize your keyboard, although the features you describe are unfamiliar to me. Check your language and other input settings.
Alternatively, you may have a physical defect in the keyboard itself. You can replace a damaged laptop keyboard. I have done it at least once, and I may do it again soon.
Oh, is that where that comes from? I didn’t realize. That’s so funny that you we should go down to the quarry and… anyway.
Thanks for the advice, all. I was hoping that the answer would be “oh, you just need to wobble the thingie on the whatchamacallit”. Unfortunately, now I think it’s the physical keyboard that is the problem. A while after I posted the OP, it re-messed itself up in a new and even more interesting way. I turned the computer off and left it overnight. Now it’s back to normal. I’m thinking overheating issue, and that I’ll be typing gibberish again as soon as my computer heats back up. Then it’ll go kerplunk permanently.
Oh, well. It’s always the keyboard that goes first. Actually, make that second, the headphone jack is already busted. Maybe it’s time to chuck this laptop in the quarry one of these days.
One time one of my cats ran across my laptop keyboard, hit some combination of keys, and suddenly by screen was sideways. I googled “cat ran across keyboard” and got a zillion hits. Apparently this is a common occurrence. One of the search results gave me a key combo that put things to rights.
Seriously, is it possible that somehow you or someone accidentally hit some combination of keys that remapped the keyboard?
The only thing the keyboard does is tell the OS that the 3rd key in the second row was pressed or the 2nd key in the third row was released. Everything else is done in software, in the BIOS I believe. Even if it works with a different keyboard, it doesn’t prove anything because that will use a different keyboard program. Been there, done that. Turning off the computer and leaving it overnight is almost certainly no different from rebooting.