DazV

I ask as I've now got 2 friends with an identical problem on their machines. Whenever they type anything it turns into garbage on the screen eg. £1$e^%SDF%

Seems too coincidental to be dirty keyboards - anyone know of a virus or bug which you do this ?

Neil Smalley

Microsoft office??

Drop jack clark a mail. He'd know jackclark@ntlworld.com

JackClark

Get them to give this a go. FreeScan

Nicks VR4

Found this
It seems to be a very old virus with variants as well

http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_669.htm
best your mate gets hold of some AV software

JackClark

That's a super old memory resident DOS file infector, if you can get that to run on a modern operating system I'll buy you a beer.

what would scooby do

I reckon it's the Stella Artois Virus LOL

DazV

I know I know - sound like they're just pi$$ed or something when they're typing, but its not. In fact the moment it started happening was just after we attempted to do the "remote assistance" thing on windows messenger

strange both of them have the same problem at the same time!

DazV

both of them are running up-to-date virus protection too.

john_s

iTrader: (1)

Beer?

John

DazV

actually if you look at say the symantec website and its virus database, and search on the keywords "keyboard" and "type" it lists about 3 which intercept the keyboard interrupt and remap it.

Thing is, we checked for these viruses and it can't find any evidence of them.

-DV

Iain Young

You haven't unknowingly changed your default keyboard to Japanese have you? That would have the same effect....

Iain

paula_k

no, but I like your thinking!

and its not me, its a mate of mine

am poppnig down to sort his wifi broadband/hub tonight so will check all those kinda things

its seems strange as another friend of mine has an identical problem also on his laptop - which made me think of a virus perhaps.

DazV

update - it definitely seems a hardware error to do with his keyboard, as we tried plugging in an external keyboard and that works fine.

Iain Young

Ah, so my suggestion wasn't so outrageous then

Nicks VR4

Maybe try downloading new drivers for it ???

DazV

Nicks, part of his keyboard works, part of it doesn't

could be the underlying circuitry - maybe's a dry joint or something.