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#1
Keyboards no longer work on Windows 7, but the function keys work
Hi everyone, this is a really puzzling problem that I've never seen before or even heard of.
Basically, my battery backup for my PC has recently conked out and there was a temporary power outage in my building. So the battery backup didn't kick in (my fault for not replacing it) and the PC was shut down instantly. When I booted it back up, the USB wired keyboard was no longer working, but everything else was fine.
To debug this issue, I've tried all of the following:
* Tried the USB in a different port
* Tried the same keyboard on my mac laptop, it works fine, so the keyboard is not at fault.
* Tried two other keyboards (one USB wire, one USB wireless) on the PC, neither of them works on this PC. Both these other keyboards work fine on my Mac and on another PC.
* Noticed yellow exclamation points in the Device Manager under keyboards, indicating a "code 19" error. I followed these instructions. The error went away but the keyboard problem did not.
* Did a malware check.
* Tried booting in safe mode, still same problem. I'm able to boot into safe mode with F8 because the keyboard works fine during boot up. Only at the login screen do the lights go out and it stops working.
* I tried disabling the drivers, uninstalling the drivers, updating the drivers, and restarting.
* Tried rolling my PC back to a restore point. System Restore keeps telling me that my anti virus program is preventing access to some files so the restore point doesn't seem to go through.
* Tried System Restore in safe mode, same result. Tried uninstalling anti-virus and disabling Windows Firewall. I get the same error on attempting to restore the system. This is another issue altogether but just mentioning that I tried it.
Some other things to note:
* The device manager doesn't list a specific keyboard device to match the keyboard itself (It's an "Elephant" brand keyboard), it only lists "HID Keyboard Device" and "Wireless Keyboard Filter Device", both of which are listed as "working properly". I don't know if that's a problem, or if that's common to not list the keyboard itself.
* The whole thing seems to have been caused by the power outage so it could be a hardware issue. But the fact that this isn't indicated in Device Manager is puzzling (but I'm not a hardware expert).
* The function key combos work fine. So I can do Fn-Home to open Windows calculator, for example.
If anyone has any suggestions on what to try next, I'd appreciate it! Thank you.