Does your computer drive you crazy? Mine does. Since retiring, I spend a lot of time on line. Too much time. Ridiculously too much time. So much time that I am too embarrassed to reveal the many hours. And when it doesn't work, my life goes into a spin. We're not talking Verizon going down for the tenth million time this year, we're talking the dreaded mechanical failure.
The keyboard on my laptop has suddenly stopped working. Any time I attempt to type a message or an email, all that shows is gibberish. (If you're wondering how I am writing this blog, I'm using someone else's computer). What the heck happened to it? I ran Avast scans for a few hours, but they revealed nothing. If I had a virus, wouldn't Avast tell me and then quickly clean it up? If the computer has done the unbearable - suddenly crashed - wouldn't I be unable to surf the net? I spent all last night trying different fixes. Nothing worked. Imagine what someone as obnoxiously opinionated as I goes through when she can't type a snappy retort to someone else's obnoxious opinion? Not pretty!
When I had no success with my keyboard, I turned to the other electronic in my house, my Nook. Of course, it was battery dead so I had to wait a few hours to charge it back up. By the time I gave up trying to get to my email on the Nook, I was ready to throw it against the wall. Tapping my fat fingers on the keyboard yielded nothing but mis-taps and wrong letters. I couldn't get the type big enough to read. In fact, I couldn't even get all the messages to come up. I yelled at it for refusing to cooperate with me. I swear it smirked evilly at me as it turned itself off.
For normal people, step three would have been to go to the smart phone. I only have a flip up stupid phone, and it probably had a low to dead battery anyway.
I can't remember how old my laptop is. If I follow the advice of the geeks, anything over a year is too old and should be replaced. Since all I use it for is emailing, blog writing, web surfing, candy crushing, words with friending, weather reporting, TV guiding, recipe locating (to be honest, I do little of that), and picture holding, I have no desire to own a super duper deluxe machine. For goodness sakes, I just spent $3000 to save my damn dog's life, and I so don't want another big expense.
What's a girl to do? Right now I have turned it off and I am going back to it Sunday night. If I'm lucky, I'll turn it on and type away. We'll just pretend that little glitch never happened. If I'm not lucky, and lately I seem to be in a luck funk, the keyboard will still be tuned into hyerogliphyics. Call Geek Squad? Decide to get a new one since the CD player on it hasn't worked since the day I dropped it, and now this is just another thing wrong? Decisions. Decisions.
Hi Barbara. I'm Sam, a close friend of Cathy's. She emailed me today about your computer woes. There's a couple of things it could be, the worst being a dead keyboard. But there's a few easy things you can check first.
ReplyDelete1) If you have a normal Desktop keyboard or USB keyboard, try connecting it to the laptop and see if it still types gibberish. If so, then the problem isn't the laptop's keyboard.
2) Look at the lights at the top of the keyboard and see if the light for NumLock is on. If so, then what it's doing is changing alot of your keys into numerical format, similar to a 10-key. If it's on, then try turning it of by holding the FN key, and pressing the NumLock key. You should see that light turn off. Try typing again and see if that fixes it. If your laptop has a separate 10-key on the right side, then this is probably not the issue. Also with it being the NumLock key, usually that change only stays active until the computer is powered off or rebooted, which means there is a good chance it will go back to normal once you power it back on, if that is the problem.
Try those two and let me know what you're results are.
Thanks,
Sam Snyder
Thank you Sam. I'll try your techniques when I get home to my computer. Very kind of you to respond.
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