Keyboard Issue

[Shaggy Hiker]

I'll have to post a picture of this in Chit-Chat, but I have rigged a platform and keyboard tray onto my treadmill so that I can walk and work at the same time. In fact, as I type this I am climbing a modest 4% grade at 3mph. Works well, and should allow me to eat like a hog while not getting too fat from my sedentary coding lifestyle.

The problem I am having is with the keyboard. The current computer in use is a laptop, which sits on a shelf to which I have attached a keyboard tray. I bought a cheap Logitech Classic 200 Keyboard, because it has no unnecessary frills, and is a size that fits well on the tray I have. Size turned out to be not such an issue, but I saw no reason to pay a bundle for this setup. At first, it worked fairly well, except occasionally a key would just repeat forever. Generally, I was able to stop it by hitting another key, but if the key was the backspace, it just wouldn't stop until I unplugged the keyboard (USB). It was a bit annoying to watch a page of code get gobbled up by a runaway process. Then just in the last hour, the keyboard started working very intermittently, then not at all. Pulling the plug and plugging it back in would get it working again for a few characters, then it would quit again.

Normally, for an item this cheap, I would just replace it, but keyboards are simple things, so I am suspecting that the problem may not actually lie with the keyboard, but rather with the laptop. Therefore, before I rush back out and lay down another $20 for one of these keyboards, I thought I might go fishing on here for some opinions. Has anyone heard of symptoms like this, and is the problem likely to be in the keyboard or the laptop?

[Hack]

Wow! I thought I was the only person this happens to.

I feel pretty comfortable saying that it is not the keyboard. This happens on my laptop as well. In fact, the EXACT same symptoms. The first time it happened, I thought I'd picked up a virus, so I scanned the bejesus out of this laptop and found nothing.

It is a company laptop, so the second time it happened, I called the hardware services guys. Several days later, some dude came out, looked at it for about 10 and a half seconds, and told me it was my keyboard, and he gave me a new keyboard.

About a half an hour later, it happened all over again.

It has since happened when no keyboard was attached and I was using the laptop keyboard.

Something is screwy with my laptop, and it sounds like something is screwy with yours as well. If you want to try the same experiement, then use your laptop for a while without the external keyboard and I suspect you will get a runaway key again.

What kind of laptop do you have? I have an HP.

[CodedFire]

Guys ive also had that problem with logitech keyboards!

[Hack]

That may be true, but I have encountered the problem both with an attached keyboard (not logitech) and with no attached keyboard.

[kregg]

How about trying a couple of other USB ports guys? Updating the drivers?

[Lord Orwell]

i had that issue with a logitech wired keyboard. I swapped keyboards with wife and no issues on either system now.

[Hack]

I swapped keyboards with wife and no issues on either system now.

Just curious.....does your wife have a desktop or laptop?

[Shaggy Hiker]

I am having no troubles with the laptop keyboard directly. My next test, when I get around to it, will be to put the keyboard on a different computer. I may try that tomorrow, as I have a little work to do on a PDA program, and the computer I use for PDA testing and dev work would be the easiest one to swap a keyboard out on.

Interestingly, the question has become somewhat moot at this point. Once the keyboard failed, I moved the entire laptop onto the keyboard tray. The tray is a really solid piece of work, and it is large enough, so it holds the laptop really well. The only problem with that setup is that it overbalances the whole platform, which makes it rotate forwards very easily. I remedied that by placing a 10 lb weight on the back of the platform to counterbalance the leverage provided by the laptop and tray. That works well, so I have no need for an external keyboard.

Eventually I will need a keyboard, though, once I set up a game computer to use on the treadmill, but that can wait until fall. I'll test the keyboard on a different computer, but if it fails on that other computer, I won't be replacing it anytime soon.

[Lord Orwell]

Just curious.....does your wife have a desktop or laptop?

actually neither. It's a mac-mini. Mostly laptop parts inside.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Ok, I have just been using the keyboard for some editing, e-mails, dev work, etc. on a different computer, and it has worked flawlessly for over an hour. Since it never worked flawlessly when attached to the laptop, I can only assume that the keyboard is not at fault. I'll try it on the laptop again in an hour or so, just to see what happens.