1 Spammy Keyboard Inputs (even with keyboard ribbon disconnected!)
This one's a weird one. I haven't seen anyone else report something like this on some cursory searches.
- Laptop boots up, at win11 login password prompt, a bunch of spammy characters begin appearing.
- It's only a certain limited list of characters: [1-9], 'p', periods, backslashes, and backspace and home key inputs. Very rarely it seems like capslock is pressed. I can see this via using the mouse to view the password inputs, (and later in the BIOS keyboard test utility).
- Assume it's keyboard damage from liquid or a crappy ribbon or connection or something. Remove back cover, disconnect keyboard ribbon.
- Realize I can't turn the PC on since the power button is on the keyboard... reconnect ribbon, hit power button, disconnect ribbon quickly.
- Boots to windows, same problem, even with no keyboard connected?!
- Connect external USB keyboard and also enable windows accessibility on-screen keyboard. Confirm they are working via capslock LED on external keyboard and capslock button being indicated on the on-screen keyboard.
- I can sneak in some random characters with either, such as letters, amidst the unending spam input.
- Boot to BIOS via holding F2 during restart. To my horror, the problem persists there, even with no external keyboard connected and after unplugging the built-in keyboard ribbon. I can click on some fields that allow free text, and it's populated by at least seemingly random characters (see 1.1 above for which). There's an ASUS keyboard test option in the BIOS which shows actual key presses and they're fluttering all over the place constantly.
I'm a bit lost on how to proceed, folks. It seems like it might be something on the firmware level, that ASUS just decided to update for me and basically brick my machine?
crwdns2934109:0crwdne2934109:0
crwdns2889612:0crwdne2889612:0
0
5 
crwdns2944067:02crwdne2944067:0
Consider you may be dealing with a virus rather than a hardware issue. I'd start by pulling the hard drive and scanning it with a different machine, full scan including rootkits.. You can try scanning it in place and/or using an on-line scanner. but I'd just skip to scanning it while it is not in use at all with the weird behavior. If you have the luxury of another machine to scan it with either in an external USB enclosure or as a non-boot drive, or try booting with a USB stick set up to scan from that.
crwdns2934271:0crwdnd2934271:0 Juan Garcia crwdne2934271:0
Thank you for the thought. The malware angle is possible. However, it seems as if it has nothing to do with anything on the disk. Even with the drive pulled, the issue was affecting the machine at the BIOS level.
Annoyingly, the problem seems to have vanished within the last 12 hours. The issue cropped up first four days ago when I had it in a backpack on a ~45 minute walk to a place. It resolved itself after ~10 minutes and a couple of restarts. Then, much later that same day, I did the same ~45 minute walk back home, and left it in the backpack for ~24 hours before turning it on. After that period, about 2.5 days ago, was when the problem manifested the second time, and persisted for over 12 hours.
Since yesterday, I have continued to power it on and off, both plugged in and not, for various lengths of time. I think I am going to put it in a backpack and take it for a long dog walk tomorrow. I'm as angry at the crappy ASUS device as I am intrigued by what is going on.
crwdns2934271:0crwdnd2934271:0 Brent crwdne2934271:0