posted on July 27, 2000 05:44:08 PM new
What a frustrating day this has been. My Dell portable system had to go in to Dell to have some defective hinges repaired. They also replaced the system board to fix my right sound channel which was totally out.
Amazingly, Airborne Express picked the unit up from me on Tuesday of this week, and it was back today (Thursday). I was thrilled that they fixed it that fast. I put the hard drive back in, the battery, fired it up and it worked! The sound was fixed, they whole cover had been replaced, joy!
Then I tried to type something, and my joy was short-lived. My keyboard is fouled up and not typing correctly. If I type an "i", I get "wi", if I type "w", I get "iw". 2 results in "82", and "8" results in "28". Rebooting didn't help, all settings in Control Panel are correct.
Don't mind me, just having a pity-party here. Obviously we have more than one computer, but the Dell is mine, bought with hard earned eBay money last year. I bought it slightly used from a friend for a great price. Hubby and I can be online at the same time with our home network, and it's great.
posted on July 27, 2000 06:23:47 PM new
It sounds like a communication problem.
Have a look at the keyboard plug that you plug into the CPU. Years ago I had a dot matrix printer that sometimes printed weird stuff. The problem was the plug. The little prongs inside the plug (which connected to the printer) got bent a bit. I straightened them (using a nail file) and the printer worked fine... until the next time I bent them.
posted on July 27, 2000 06:29:13 PM new
Unfortunately, this is a laptop computer, so there is nothing I can check. We did plug a regular keyboard into it, and that works fine, so the keyboard on the laptop itself is the one with the problem.
I am waiting to hear from the tech support person at Dell that helped me cut through the red tape and get the first problems fixed. I'm sure they will make it right, it's just that it will have to go back again for the work.
posted on July 28, 2000 07:09:27 AM new
Meya, I actually thought about my post when I was going to sleep last night and said to myself, "That probably sounded pretty flippant, even though I didn't mean it that way," and figured I should apologize in the AM. Here I am, and I'm sorry. To tell you the truth, after I read your post, I fiddled with my system settings for awhile just to see if I could correlate your problems with anything logical; e.g., if they'd set your keyboard inadvertently to Urdu, or something. Couldn't find anything there. Took a look at the ASCII behind the affected characters--again, no obvious correlation in the snafu, to my primitive eyes anyway. It sure would have been nice to find something that made sense and helped you fix it without sending it back to Dell, but I figured you would have to send it back. I've had a lot of hardware problems over time and know that things happen and it's a shock when they do, but they can almost always be repaired or the faulty parts replaced.
But I AM sorry about what I think was a flippant tone, and didn't mean it that way. If you find out what was wrong with it when it's fixed, I'd love to know. Best of luck with a speedy turnaround and a perfectly functioning system when it gets back to you.
posted on July 28, 2000 09:08:09 PM new
Meya....Do us ALL a favor and type a response to this thread with the faulty keyboard...then we can have a contest to see who can translate it the quickest!!!
Keith
I assume full responsibility for my actions, except
the ones that are someone else's fault.
