I have been having issues with my keyboard for as long as I can remember. The Shift, Control, Windows, and Alt keys were not functioning properly at all and were becoming quite the annoyance. It seemed as if while held down, the keys were randomly toggling themselves on and off while I pressed other keys.
For instance, I would end up replacing whole lines of text with a “c” while trying to press Ctrl-C to copy the line. Similarly, the paste shortcut Ctrl-v would wipe out text in a single swoop as well. Trying to quickly save usually left random “s” characters in my documents, and many words were left lower case due to my malfunctioning Shift key.
I originally chalked it up to my keyboard itself. It was a cheap PS/2 keyboard that came with my computer, so I decided to swap it out for a new, USB keyboard. I figured the problem was with the hardware, so I would be good to go once I replaced it.
Not so.
My problems continued to persist until one day I had an idea. Perhaps it wasn’t the keyboard, perhaps it wasn’t some odd Windows issue. Perhaps it was the drivers loaded by Windows for my keyboard.
I did some digging in Windows’ Device Manager and decided that the best course of action would be to see if I could remove and re-add my keyboard from the system. I removed both keyboards listed there and then rebooted. Suddenly all my problems were gone, and your can be too if you do the following:
- Open the Device Manager – it’s under Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> System in Vista
- Navigate to the Keyboards section as shown below
- Right-click on any entries there and select Uninstall
- Wait for Windows to remove the hardware and then reboot
Windows should now re-detect the keyboard and you should be all set. Now, this doesn’t work for all keyboard issues as some of them are indeed hardware-related, but it worked to fix the issue I have been struggling with for months!