Murphy's law in practice

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The photo comes from MSI website

You must have heard about Murphy's law saying that Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. We can also add ...at the least expected moment or ...at the worst possible time. Some time ago I had quite a busy evening i.e. I had to write some urgent e-mails etc. Everything was ok until suddenly my computer (MSI GE60 2OE, Windows 10) went crazy.

It started typing on his own and the last thing I could do was to make a hard restart. Unfortunately, it didn't help. The computer started normally but I couldn't login because I couldn't write any alpha numeric character. In other words keyboard buttons simply didn't work except the space bar, Enter, Shift and maybe something else. To make things even worse the on-screen keyboard also didn't work. Moreover the problem was not only with the laptop keyboard but also with the external one!

Usually, I don't care much about my keyboard but in this kind of situation it turns about to be the most vital part of my computer. What did I do? I waited a moment and restarted the computer, tried if it works, waited a moment and restarted the computer... and at some point at least my external keyboard started to work. On the next day the situation appeared again. I read dozens of forums and I tried to:

• Uninstall the keyboard driver in the Device Manager and restart the computer.
• Disable Ease of Access settings related to keyboard.
• Press combinations like Ctrl+Space bar when the keyboard is blocked.
• Scan the computer for the virus.
• Connect the external keyboard to another USB port.
• Update drivers.
• Disable the keyboard in BIOS.
• ...

And nothing helped!

Then I found the workaround. I got under the laptop and disconnected the keyboard from motherboard. It is not ideal situation but at least I could work with the external keyboard. I suspect that from time to time the laptop keyboard was sending strange signals to the computer and it didn't know how to interpret them. Now, I'm waiting for a new laptop keyboard.

I hope that this story would help someone somehow.

BTW

At some point I was considering to buy a new laptop. Eventually my current one is more than 3 years old. As far as I remember I bought it for around 1000 USD so I checked a few new models in the same price. I was surprised that their configurations were comparable with my old laptop. Slightly better but there was no abyss.