I thought I would share this little anecdote in case anyone else runs into it. While talking my little brother through setting up wireless on my aunt’s new laptop (an IBM Thinkpad T40) he mentioned that some updates were installing. It was a Windows XP SP2 machine that had been fully patched a week before. I had set up the machine to ask before install but to download automatically so I figured they’d hit yes at some point – the machine had been working just fine until then In any case while in the Wireless config on the router getting the WEP key the keyboard stopped working.

It didn’t just stop – every keystroke caused a little windows noise, as if they were trying to type into an invalid field or something. I’ve heard the noise before – it happens when I use Firefox‘s search function and it is not finding a match on the current page.

I did not suspect windows update at first – the mention of the updates installing had been an offhand comment and I had not really paid much attention. We had just installed updated wireless drivers so I suspected something weird there. I went through the usual stuff – had him reboot, uninstalled the driver, confirmed the keyoard was working by going into the BIOS, anything I could think of – no luck.

In the end I had them fire up System Restore. I’ll point out that this is the first time I’ve ever done that – I have been using Windows a long time (3.11), I’ve done IT/IC work, I have an RHCE, I’ve worked in Tech Support even (a long time ago). Never have I had to use System Restore, but there was nothing else I could think of, and a laptop with a non-functioning keyboard was going to be no use to my aunt. Thanks to this guide my ignorance of the process was not a problem.

The first available restore point was from the driver install – this is right around the time of the windows updates too but there was no separate option for that. Restoring to that point did not resolve our issue. So, we tried the week old restore point and voila! the keyboard started working again. Besides the wireless driver (which had already been uninstalled remember) the only difference was that the updates were now gone.

Why on earth the updates caused the keyboard to stop working is beyond me (and Google apparently) – but I will say that System Restore saved a potential re-install of windows and for that I am very thankful. I’d never seen the point of the System Restore function before, in fact I have often disabled it on my own systems, I definitely see the point now

Technorati Tags: Windows XP, Windows Update, broken keyboard, IBM thinkpad, system restore, microsoft

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