Keyboard types wrong characters J=5 etc. VERY STRANGE!

alissa280z · Jun 3, 2006

I've been a mac user for 7 or so years now and I've never had a problem like this:

I am on my PowerBook G4 which I have had for 6 months now and just this past week the keyboard started acting up. About once or twice a day when I am typing what comes up on the screen is not even close to what I typed. I'll hit H-E-L-L-O and 5-*-4-3-2 or something like that will come up. When I restart, the problem goes away for a few minutes to a few days. So I think it is software related and not hardware.

Has anyone had similar issues or have an idea how to solve so I don't have to keep restarting? THANKS!

dtravis7 · Jun 3, 2006

Just one question just to be sure, Have you spilled any water or liquid in your keyboard at any time recently? I have had a few keyboards do similar to what you are seeing that had liquid spilled into them. If not then we can move on and try to figure what is up.

alissa280z · Jun 3, 2006

No spills! One thing I though about trying was when it happens again I will plug in my USB keyboard to see if it reacts the same way.

rcltrh · Jun 3, 2006

alissa280z said:
I've been a mac user for 7 or so years now and I've never had a problem like this:

I am on my PowerBook G4 which I have had for 6 months now and just this past week the keyboard started acting up. About once or twice a day when I am typing what comes up on the screen is not even close to what I typed. I'll hit H-E-L-L-O and 5-*-4-3-2 or something like that will come up. When I restart, the problem goes away for a few minutes to a few days. So I think it is software related and not hardware.

Has anyone had similar issues or have an idea how to solve so I don't have to keep restarting? THANKS!

Obviously you checked to see if your num lock was turned on, right? f6 = num lock with green light under it? That changes your uiojkl keys to numbers.

D3v1L80Y · Jun 3, 2006

alissa280z said:
Has anyone had similar issues or have an idea how to solve so I don't have to keep restarting? THANKS!

The same thing has happened to me. Restarting is the only way to remedy this when it happens.
I would suggest a permissions repair after you restart, as that seems to have cleared it up for me. I have not had it happen to me in over a month.

alissa280z · Jun 4, 2006

D3v1L80Y said:
The same thing has happened to me. Restarting is the only way to remedy this when it happens.
I would suggest a permissions repair after you restart, as that seems to have cleared it up for me. I have not had it happen to me in over a month.

Thanks, I'll look into that.

alissa280z · Jun 4, 2006

rcltrh said:
Obviously you checked to see if your num lock was turned on, right? f6 = num lock with green light under it? That changes your uiojkl keys to numbers.

HAHA, yes. But it wasn't just the num lock keys that would be different. Another issue I was having was the delete key would delete forward instead on backwards. And the spacebar wouldn't make spaces.

Aptmunich · Jun 4, 2006

Is your Fn key stuck by any chance?

Or has a different keyboard layout been activated in the 'international' system preference pane?

HelloKitty1990 · Dec 29, 2011

Help

dtravis7 said:
Just one question just to be sure, Have you spilled any water or liquid in your keyboard at any time recently? I have had a few keyboards do similar to what you are seeing that had liquid spilled into them. If not then we can move on and try to figure what is up.

Hi Dennis I was doing some research on the web about spilling drinks on computers and came across your post. I have a macbook pro laptop and my son spilled hand sanitizer over the keyboard turned it around and left the sanitizer to come down and dried off everything but I left my computer powered on. everything was working except my keyboard it will only type out symbols. What is there to do?

Keyboard types wrong characters J=5 etc. VERY STRANGE!

alissa280z

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