In case anyone else goes through the same misery as I have and finds this...
At some point about 6 months ago, my keyboard on a Toshiba Laptop (S70-B) started behaving strangely. Random keys would not work, or I would have to hold the key for a while before the letter appeared, or I would have to hit multiple keys until the "stuck"
key worked.
I tried EVERYTHING suggested online - replace the keyboard TWICE, attached an external keyboard, completely removed the laptop keyboard and used only the external keyboard, checked for memory defects, disabled any and all services that weren't necessary
(so as to make sure my 8GB of memory was not being used up), chased down and cleared every blessed error reported by the event manager, disabled all parameters in the Easy Keyboard Access thing, increased cache, checked the machine for viruses (multiple times,
using different vendors), disabled ALL firewalls, blah blah! Basically, if anything was suggested online on on YouTube, I tried it.
NOTHING worked!
My dilemma was that I couldn't reset the computer to its original stated, and am really resistant to buy a new computer, because the process of re-installing all the software is incredibly painful. If there was an easy way for me to just move my programs,
I would have bought a new Windows machine by now.
After spending many weeks living with this problem, I noticed that *some keys* experience delays. That told me that *some process* in Windows was getting the keys first and, if not relevant, it was passing it to the keyboard driver. That led to reinstalling
all drivers.
Still, NOTHING worked!
What "broke" the case was the epiphany that all my devices (mouse, etc) were wireless. On a guess, I replaced the wireless mouse with an old-school wired mouse and Viola! The problem went away.
Weird, ha?
After that, I did some more research. It seems that at some point, one of Windows Updates totally messed up the wireless device interface. I couldn't (find a way) to move my devices to different IRQs to test this theory but the fact that using a non-wireless
mouse fixed the problem, without any other changes, is a pretty good indication that there is an IRQ conflict somewhere - where two (or more) devices get the same keystroke and have to figure out which one should handle it. Hence the delay, and keyboard slow
response.
I am working on figuring out which Microsoft Update caused this issue and/or how to get around it. I can't roll back to a previous version because I honestly don't have an exact date for when this problem started and, besides, I don't want to rollback all
security updates since whenever the defective Windows Update was released.
So... There is a good chance that your laptop keyboard is good and all you have to do is attache a wired mouse to your laptop to verify what I found.
VERY frustrating, but I'm happy that I can actually use my laptop again!
Bob