This is going to be somewhat long-winded, but I can't find any record of the same thing happening to someone else, so I'll try to mention everything I've done, and what the results were.
I own a Lenovo Ideapad Y470 laptop running Windows 7. If further information is required, I can probably get most of it, but I can't run SysInfo or another such program, because I can't boot it anymore.
A few hours ago, my keyboard suddenly went haywire. None of the keys would work, and whenever I selected a text field, it would automatically input text (almost always a single key, repeated constantly, i.e. "hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh", "666666666666666666666666", or "///////////////////////"). Sometimes this would stop for a few minutes, but the keyboard still wouldn't work. Occasionally, Windows help, or Chrome help pages if I was on Chrome, would open on their own as though ctrl+h were being pressed. Again, this was unpredictable and wouldn't happen constantly, but my keyboard would never work at all. Pressing a key sometimes seemed to set off those weird outbursts, but very often it did nothing at all. I could still use the onscreen keyboard, and could type normally with it when keys weren't randomly being pressed. The whole thing gave me the impression that it was a virus.
I ran my antivirus (the free version of Avira - I've since been told I should probably switch to Avast! or to some other better antivirus), which found nothing. I then restarted a few times, but the problem didn't go away, and was an obvious pain. I decided to boot into Lenovo's recovery tools (Lenovo includes a button on their laptops, next to the power button, that boots directly into their own recovery tools, stored on a separate partition), but my computer seems to have encountered an error while at the "Window is loading files..." step of booting the tools, as the progress bar stopped and my laptop started loudly beeping. I turned it off manually, not knowing what else to do. When I turned it back on, I got a black screen prompting me to choose between booting Windows' System Recovery Tools, which seem to do absolutely nothing, and booting Windows normally. However, the default option is the System Recovery Tools, and neither the arrow keys nor the Tab key, nor any other key on my keyboard work at all. So that is where I'm stuck right now. Lenovo's recovery tools boot properly now, but are as useless as Windows'. The partition in which they store the recovery tools is supposed to contain a backup to the computer's initial state, and that helped me with an issue in the past, but in the intervening time, my hard drive broke down, and Lenovo replaced it. It seems the replacement one doesn't include that backup.
Anyway, I know this is very long-winded, but I'm at a loss, here. I thought it was a virus, or malware of some kind, but the more I search and find no information on any similar issue, the more I think it might just be my keyboard dying completely.
I own a Lenovo Ideapad Y470 laptop running Windows 7. If further information is required, I can probably get most of it, but I can't run SysInfo or another such program, because I can't boot it anymore.
A few hours ago, my keyboard suddenly went haywire. None of the keys would work, and whenever I selected a text field, it would automatically input text (almost always a single key, repeated constantly, i.e. "hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh", "666666666666666666666666", or "///////////////////////"). Sometimes this would stop for a few minutes, but the keyboard still wouldn't work. Occasionally, Windows help, or Chrome help pages if I was on Chrome, would open on their own as though ctrl+h were being pressed. Again, this was unpredictable and wouldn't happen constantly, but my keyboard would never work at all. Pressing a key sometimes seemed to set off those weird outbursts, but very often it did nothing at all. I could still use the onscreen keyboard, and could type normally with it when keys weren't randomly being pressed. The whole thing gave me the impression that it was a virus.
I ran my antivirus (the free version of Avira - I've since been told I should probably switch to Avast! or to some other better antivirus), which found nothing. I then restarted a few times, but the problem didn't go away, and was an obvious pain. I decided to boot into Lenovo's recovery tools (Lenovo includes a button on their laptops, next to the power button, that boots directly into their own recovery tools, stored on a separate partition), but my computer seems to have encountered an error while at the "Window is loading files..." step of booting the tools, as the progress bar stopped and my laptop started loudly beeping. I turned it off manually, not knowing what else to do. When I turned it back on, I got a black screen prompting me to choose between booting Windows' System Recovery Tools, which seem to do absolutely nothing, and booting Windows normally. However, the default option is the System Recovery Tools, and neither the arrow keys nor the Tab key, nor any other key on my keyboard work at all. So that is where I'm stuck right now. Lenovo's recovery tools boot properly now, but are as useless as Windows'. The partition in which they store the recovery tools is supposed to contain a backup to the computer's initial state, and that helped me with an issue in the past, but in the intervening time, my hard drive broke down, and Lenovo replaced it. It seems the replacement one doesn't include that backup.
Anyway, I know this is very long-winded, but I'm at a loss, here. I thought it was a virus, or malware of some kind, but the more I search and find no information on any similar issue, the more I think it might just be my keyboard dying completely.