Microsoft Wireless Keyboard Problems

I’ve been using a wireless keyboard from Microsoft for the past couple months, but lately I’ve noticed that it’s been acting very strange. In particular, sometimes it will continue to enter keys even after I let the key I’m pressing up. So, if I type a word like “very” sometimes I’ll get “veryyy”. Also, sometimes the Shift key “sticks” down. No, it’s not really sticky, but I’ll get letters capitalized even after I let it up. So when I type “Mr. Smith” I might get “Mr. SMIth”. Also, it occasionally loses characters. I know for sure that I hit a key, but it doesn’t get entered. So, “Mr. Smith” might come out as “Mrith”.

I thought maybe my keyboard was just going bad, so I went to CompUSA and bought a new one. This one’s also from Microsoft and is also wireless. I couldn’t find one with just a keyboard, so I had to get a kit with a mouse, too, that I didn’t want. But I plugged in the keyboard and wireless module (the thing that’s got the radio transciever and keyboard and mouse cables coming out the back). But the new keyboard (with the new wireless module thingy) continued to do the same thing as the old one.

I bumped up the priority of the Type32.exe process, which is apparently the Microsoft software that communicates with the keyboard. But that didn’t solve the problem. So, I stole Beth’s regular old fashioned wired keyboard and it seems to be working just fine. I guess the problem must have something to do with the wireless-ness of the other keyboard. So I think I’ll go buy a new wired keyboard (I’m surprised I didn’t have one stashed away in my box of PC parts in the basement). I’ve found that I need the “natural” keyboard style. Otherwise, when I type for a long time, my fingers start to hurt.

I did some web searching to see if anyone else had problems with missing keys or repeated keys with a Microsoft wireless keyboard, and I couldn’t find anything online about it. And Microsoft’s support site didn’t say anything either. So I decided to blog about it so that if someone else has this problem someday, they might find this blog entry and know they’re not alone.