Quick to answer questions about finding your way around Linux Mint as a new user.
Forum rules
There are no such things as "stupid" questions. However if you think your question is a bit stupid, then this is the right place for you to post it. Stick to easy to-the-point questions that you feel people can answer fast. For long and complicated questions use the other forums in the support section.
Before you post read how to get help. Topics in this forum are automatically closed 6 months after creation.
trope wrote: ⤴Fri Sep 21, 2018 3:09 am
So it does not happen continuously otherwise I would be unable to use the laptop or type at all, it happens once every few minutes. Eg, it's probably happened 3 times in the last 10 minutes. When it does occur, the "key" continues executing until I hit Escape. Pressing any key seems to terminate it. So I would never get 2 letters as in your example because once I hit a "t" it would terminate the "s" and probably not recur itself. But I have not paid so much attention to striking other keys, as you can imagine I have to terminate it as soon as possible because the output can be incredible. Eg, I hit enter once when my home folder was selected, and within a couple seconds it opened 20 copies. I lost part of this message when a single backspace starting going continuously.
I have a wireless keyboard that behaves like that. It will randomly start pasting, or when I open the file manager renaming a folder or a file and I have to press 'Esc' to stop it. I assumed it was the keyboard, but reading your story I will try it with a few other systems later today to test it.
trope wrote:There is no part I can replace to fix it?
We can't read minds so we don't know. You'll have to search for your machine make and model on the internet and find out. Of course, the alternative is a $5 USB keyboard from fleabay.
"There is, ultimately, only one truth -- cogito, ergo sum -- everything else is an assumption." - Me, my swansong.
trope wrote:There is no part I can replace to fix it?
We can't read minds so we don't know. You'll have to search for your machine make and model on the internet and find out. Of course, the alternative is a $5 USB keyboard from fleabay.
I thought it had been established that the laptop is dead? But you are saying that a USB keyboard would work? I already replaced the internal keyboard and it did not fix anything.
Sorry to bump an old thread, but I found this thread when I was having the exact same issues of random keys executing and repeating as described here with the same model Dell Latitude E6440 that I recently acquired.
I have since found that the solution to this problem is to update the BIOS. When I was having the issue (which was occurring at least once every 5 minutes or so for me also) my system was running BIOS version A08. After Updating to the latest BIOS Version (At the time of writing is A23) the problem has disappeared.
According to several posts on the Dell site the E6440 had problems with random "double spacing" with the original bios versions in windows which was fixed with a BIOS update in 2015.
