Windows 7 misses keystrokes from internal keyboard after hibernation (on Acer Aspire 5820)

Posted by ron on Super User See other posts from Super User or by ron
Published on 2011-02-17T13:38:33Z Indexed on 2011/02/17 15:27 UTC
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I face a very strange symptom on my Acer Aspire laptop (with the factory default Win7 install and divers. Windows update running).

After waking the computer from hibernation, it is a pain to type, since on average 5-10 keypresses are missing per 100 presses, using the laptop's keyboard. Steps to reproduce:

1) Power off
2) Power on, wait for system to become usable
3) Open notepad, for 5 times do hit 10x the same character. This gives a similar pattern of 50 chars total:

xxxxxxxxxxyyyyyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaassssssssssdddddddddd

4) Optionally repeat. Everything is fine this far.
5) Hibernate.
6) Power on and resume.
7) Repeat steps 3)-4). This time approximately 3-5 character will be missing from each 50 characters.

What I ruled out:

  • putting to Sleep or just Locking and resuming from there does not cause problem
  • battery / AC usage does not matter
  • net connection does not matter
  • running processes seem to be the same before and after hibernation
  • key press speed doesn't really matter. For the test I use a nominal 3-5 strokes/second beat.
  • plugging in an external USB keyboard works fine, but the built-in one still misbehaves

What could be the problem? How could I diagnose if the keypresses arrive in, but get swallowed at some point? (maybe some nasty keyboard handler hook misbehaves?).

Update: It seems that pushing the PowerSmart button and toggling to power saving state fixes the problem. Also, toggling it again back to the original state keeps it fixed. So this may be a fine workaround, but is not a conforming solution.

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