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Hi,
I have one of these keyboards at home and at the office, in the office I have the whole desktop including the mouse, but at home I only have the keyboard. I upgraded from the Microsoft Ergo 4000 keyboard that I've used for many years. So far I'm enjoying the keyboard but I have an issue that I was wondering if there was a way to fix?
The one at work doesn't seem to have this problem although I use the keyboards differently, at work it's mainly for typing and coding, at home I use it for typing and gaming.
The issue:
The Shift, Alt, and Control buttons when pressed numerous times seem to stick even when they aren't being pressed. For example if I have 3 out of 5 files I want move from one folder to another, if I push and hold control, select the files in the 1st, 3rd, and 5th position with my mouse, after I drag them to the other folder and release the control button, if I click on the 2 remaining files in the original folder, both files are selected even though I'm not holding control down so you'd expect only 1 to be selected.
Same issue happens in games where I've bound hotkeys to use modifiers such as shift, control, or alt. If I'm alternating between 1 and shift-1, eventually just pressing 1 will result in shift-1 being registered. I initially thought that maybe stickey keys was being turned on but I've confirmed that is not the case.
Both cases are resolved by simply pressing the button that's sticking and that fixes it, but when using multiple modifiers, it's hard to determine which one is sticking so it usually results in pressing each of the buttons, alt, control, and shift once until it's back to normal.
Additional Information:
None of these problems seem apparent on my work desktop. I'm using windows 8.1 Pro at home and windows 7 pro at work. At work, my receiver is plugged into a usb switch as I use it for 2 pcs, the switch is 2 ft away from my keyboard position in line of sight.
At home, the usb receiver is plugged into the back of my desktop under my desk, out of line of site? (could this be a problem?)
Any ideas you have to solve either of these issues would be most appreciated.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
I've found a solution:
Open Device Manager
Under Human Interface Devices, locate the Microsoft Hardware USB Keyboard
Right click, Properties
Power Management Tab, Uncheck allow the computer to turn off this device to save power
That fixed it for me, no need to uninstall/change drivers.
Personally I fail to understand how USB sleep can even be an issue. My PC is configured to never sleep, and the issue happens during typing. Am I missing something?
USB sleep is different from PC sleep; it is just the system sending a USB device (the receiver in this case) into a low-power mode where it needs less power than in normal mode, but can still receive input from the keyboard. I wrote an, er, lengthy speculative essay on that near the top of page 9 of this thread.
Does your system also miss keys being pressed? If so, I suspect that either your keyboard or receiver is bad, or you have some radio interference between the two. If not, if you only have "stuck-down" keys, if could be the USB sleep thing, but only if this only happens after holding a key down for at least several seconds. If it also happens when you just briefly press a key while typing, and the key does not "release", it is caused by something else.
That did not work for me and still experiencing the issue in windows 10 as if you scroll through the thread it didn't work for others either. I configured every keyboard and mouse device as you specified which had no affect for me.
Like I said I got around it by using another keyboard when I need to hold down buttons for longer than 5 or so seconds so I use this keyboard strictly for non gaming related tasks and never experience the problem.
Personally I fail to understand how USB sleep can even be an issue. My PC is configured to never sleep, and the issue happens during typing. Am I missing something?
The problem is the USB sleep, which inexplicably the driver does not disable. However you can manually override this if you find the correct device to reconfigure, as described in a post a few above.
I thought this didn't work to start with, but it's easy to think you've amended the setting for the device and in fact not amended precisely the correct entry. Given it really is the cause of the problem, there's no reason why setting this correctly shouldn't fix the problem. It did for me, on all my copies of this keyboard on all my computers.
Of course, it's mind-boggling that Microsoft haven't fixed this themselves yet.
