Dual Core keyboard bug

Hi all,

Just upgraded to an Athlon 3800x2 Dual core, with an Asus mobo.


problem
======

Every so often, the keyboard will lag and not recognise input, or a key will begin repeating like mad. It is very annoying typing:

"Hello worrrrrrrrrrrld" for instance.

I have installed all hotfixes and done windows update and installed the amd drivers for dual core to no avail. Nothing seems to work. Please tell me you have a solution for this!

Thanks in advance!

Obvious question: tried another keyboard?

It's a brand new keyboard but yep, happens on the old keyboard too :(

If it's a USB keyboard, maybe try another USB port?

Oh, I was planning on upgrading to a 64 X2 too.

Some people claim that ATI tool can cause this. However, there could be lots of causes for the lag.

If the keyboards are USB then try a PS/2 Connector.

I reckon the CPU is fine. However, the motherboard could be (and probably is) the source of the lag.

I think it's ok with the PS/2 adaptor. This is odd though that it should have a problem with USB.

It's caused by the BIOS shadow options you have on your USB. Drop into the BIOS and alter the USB shadow options, then all should be ok :)

*edit* change it from shadow to 640k

check if you have legacy usb keyboard support enabled in the BIOS.

Also, did you install the drivers that came with your motherboard? they may seem optional a lot of the time, but without them, you can run into little glitches such as this.

> or a key will begin repeating like mad.

Red Ocktober has been battling with that problem for years.

it's not an amdx2 issue, i've had one for months with no problems beyond a clash with older nvidia drivers that caused opengl to run flat out 100%.

What the fark is wrong with PS/2 anyhoo? I know it's classed as 'legacy' but seriously, what is the issue?

99.99% of people are going to plug a keyboard and a mouse into their PC. So, we need to have the capability of plugging a keyboard and mouse into the motherboard. Oh, there are 2 ports on the motherboard that allow us to do this. One is green, it is for your mouse. One is purple, it is for your keyboard.

Pluggy pluggy. There we go. Oh, incidentally, this means you've got upwards of 2 USB ports free at the back of your PC to plug in a scanner, a printer and a USB hub that sits on your desk (or is in your monitor) so that you can easily plug in your mobile phone, camera, ipod and many other dazzling items.

Sheesh :)


**EDIT** Just so we are clear, I'm not having a pop at anyone here. I'm having a pop at computer manufacturers who like to change things because it makes their life easier, even if it makes ours harder.

I use a PS/2 mouse and keyboard... because they work. End of story. :)

Yeah, I have an optical mouse on my desktop that does weird stuff. Out of nowhere, the mouse gets a mind of its own, and it just swipes left on you, and it just seems to run away from your control, and just keeps going left, and spins you around in circles. I've been there, done that before. With a keyboard, I can understand this happening.

I got a problem with my keyboard: It's a new MS Multimedia Pro keyboard and I installed all the drivers. At first everything worked fine, the 'favorites' buttons worked, all the other odd buttons too, and every key was doing it's assigned task. One day it deicided to stop working though, so now if you press F1, instead of oppening 'help' it quits the currently in use window or program. Also, the 'favorites' keys and all the extra keys just stopped working. I'm using Windows XP Home. Any ideas? (oh, and it's plugged into PS/2)

One big problem of PS/2 that many people are not aware of, is that they are not meant to be hot-swappable. There is a real risk that you short out your PS/2 port by unplugging or plugging in a mouse while your system is not turned off.
I know I've seen more than my fair share of computers over the years with dead on-board PS/2 connectors thanks to this... And unlike with USB (which is hot-swappable anyway), you don't happen to have a spare built-in PS/2 port to fall back on either.

That sucks especially because the PS/2 ports tend to be on-board devices, so if you're particularly unlucky part of the motherboard can short out as well.

On top of that there's the potential 'confusion' about which port to plug in the mouse or keyboard (less of an issue with the newer color-coded connectors)

Supposedly the PS/2 ports are also less efficient than USB, meaning they cause more overhead on the backend to communicate with for your CPU.

Then of course there's the whole push to get away from 'legacy' devices overall, which be a *major* inconvenience in many environments. More and more laptops don't include parallel or serial ports anymore. Not a big deal for many people, but a crippling problem if you deal with routers or embedded devices a lot, which can often only be configured over a serial connection.

IIRC Intel's roadmap showed that they were planning to abandon the onboard floppy connector on their motherboard lines before long as well. Bad idea IMHO -- people may seldom use floppies anymore (thanks to 'better' alternatives such as flash drives, etc.), but on the rare occasions that you need a floppydrive, you really need one... Especially in system recovery situations, a USB floppy drive won't be an option either.

- ps/2 is a liability, raises costs slightly and is out of date with less power and less speed than USB. USB allows more funky things to be done.

- IMHO its a great thing floppy is going. All future oses will be CD compatible at install and recovery anyway. Thats another useless expense gone that we don't need, shouldn't need.

I still use my floppy drives, on occasion. When I want to transfer a few files between machines, it's pretty handy.

floppy is still fine for moving small files.

Everything up to Windows XP still relies far too much on a floppy drive being available. Just try installing your non-standard SATA drivers during XP install without a floppy drive. Seriously, good luck with that!

Hopefully, Vista (and everything else from then on) will accept CD and USB as potential sources of drivers during an installation process.

Linux seems pretty happy running from a CD, so a recovery mode is very usable without resorting to floppies.

I'd love to lose the floppy drive. The only time I use one is reinstalling XP.

Most of today's PCs rely more on a media card reader than a floppy drive. After all, you got up to 2 GB, maybe 4 GB memory cards that are almost replacing the floppy drive. IMHO, that's probably what everyone's starting to use. Hey, media cards are more than just to carry around your MP3s or JPEGs, you can fit a whole Blitz game on one 1 GB SD card or CF card with no trouble whatsoever (if not, you got maybe the biggest Blitz game in the whole wide world).

Eh? I don't see how today's PC 'rely' on have a media card reader, as I never had one in any of my PC's yet somehow always managed to get by. It's almost as silly as saying they rely on tapedrives -- sure, if you happen to have the media (tapes) around anyway it can be an acceptable delivery method, but since most people don't have a reader for it, it's not a very common delivery mechanism.

Sure, there could be cases where media cards are convenient, but they have nothing over a simple USB flash drive... Which eliminate the need for a special reader as well, so those are a significantly *better* alternative.

But there is a much bigger issue than just a delivery method for whatever game/document/data files you have. The real value/necessity of a floppy comes into play when you're looking at system installations, diagnostics, and recovery.

Anyway, as vinylpusher pointed out, loading non-standard storage drivers during a windows installation can ONLY be done from Floppy. Not CD, not USB, not media card, not network, not anything else -- floppy *only*.

So if you have a fancy-schmancy RAID controller, SCSI adapter, or SATA drive, you're screwed unless you have a floppy drive. The only other way is spending a lot of time & efford to roll ouot your own windows installation disc with the necesary drivers slipstreamed in, which requires another functional computer with a CD burner to be available, and is over most people's head anyway.

The problem is that most of these installations and recovery systems need to kick in *before* your fancy plug-and-play operating systems ever get a chance to load, so you simply don't have the options of loading USB drivers to use your superduperdeluxe floppy alternative. The floppy itself, in contrast, is supported by your PC at a BIOS level, and it knows how to handle one of those, no matter what.