# Keyboard goes quirky, then BIOS beep codes

## SenorZorro

Hey

I've been suffering from this problem for some time now, a year at least. I play Hedgewars and GTA2 (the latter through wine) quite often. While playing Hedgewars, my laptop will often (once per 3 games average) do something very strange. What normally happens when you press and hold a key while typing, for example "y", is that the character "y" is written, then a short pause for lets say 200ms, and then the character "y" is repeated at a defined rate, lets say 25 times per second. Now when this error happens, the effect is that my laptop seems to ignore the first "y", and after a pause during which no character appears, suddenly a whole series appear. Impossible to write anything. Even if I go to a TTY they keyboard still behaves like that.

Technical probably unimportant detail: In fact it might ignore more than just the first character. The characters that do finally appear seem to be those that have been entered a fraction of a second ago, instead of being entered and shown in real time. How do I know? Because as soon as I let go of "y" some characters still appear, and also I am unable to enter just two "yy" character where the first one would have appeared immediately if my system was working normally, and the second after the 200ms break, after which I let go of the "y" key. When the system is quirky, I can't seem to get any less than about so many characters to appear: yyyyyy

What triggers this? I don't know. I have noticed the system doing that quite often while playing Hedgewars, and very rarely while playing GTA2. Never elsewhere. I don't play any other games. I make use of photography software that uses the GPU, and never experienced this. I sometimes use OpenGL desktop effects in KDE4, never noticed this happening because of that either. I can't reliably reproduce.

How do I undo this behavior? I can't get rid of it without rebooting. I tried keeping a tail -f on /var/log/dmesg and messages, and haven't noticed anything at all appearing when this error triggers. When I reboot, the BIOS makes four error beep codes: 2-3-4-3. I can't find what they mean. The store I bought the laptop from no longer exists. I also forgot what the motherboard model is, please remind me, how can I check it? After the error beep codes, nothing happens, black screen, the BIOS doesn't proceed to load. I have to unplug the power cord, then the laptop turns off (my battery is faulty, so no power cord = no power) and when I plug the power cord back in it's as if nothing bad ever happened, everything works fine, until the next fail while playing HW/GTA2.

How do I trace it down? How do I check what motherboard model I have? What could possibly be the problem?

I've tried various Xorg and nvidia-drivers versions over the months. This laptop is under 2 years old. I don't remember when I first saw the problem, but I don't think it was there since the beginning.

Current specs:

Clevo W870CU laptop

Gentoo Linux x86_64

gcc-4.5.3-r1, glibc-2.12.2, kernel gentoo-sources-3.1.0-r1

nvidia-drivers-290.06

GPU: GeForce GTX 285M

CPU: Intel Core i7 820QM

RAM: 2 x 4GB SODIMM 667MHz

HD: Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB internal hard drive - 300 Mbps - 7200 RPM

kde 4.7.3

All help most appreciated!

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## gerard27

Most probable: a heat problem.

Gerard.

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## SenorZorro

Nope, my laptop runs cool.

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## SenorZorro

Bump

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## WorBlux

Running lspci as root should give you an idea as to the motherboard model.

I would check to make sure there aren't any BIOS updates that mention fixing something like this. 

Another thing I might play with is power and interrupt interface options in the BIOS, but that's just a wild ass guess really.

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## SenorZorro

Wild guesses are all I have to go on :]

I removed the laptop's battery, the error hasn't happened since then but I'm not celebrating just yet, need to test for a few days more.

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## BitJam

 *WorBlux wrote:*   

> Running lspci as root should give you an idea as to the motherboard model.

 

s/lspci/lshw/

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## SenorZorro

ps. the motherboard name it gave me is the same as the laptop model - Clevo W870CU

```
  *-core

       description: Motherboard

       physical id: 0

     *-firmware

          description: BIOS

          vendor: Phoenix Technologies LTD

          physical id: 0

          version: CALPELLACRB.86C.0000.X.0000000000

          date: 04/01/2010

          size: 117KiB

          capacity: 4032KiB

          capabilities: isa pci pcmcia pnp upgrade shadowing escd cdboot acpi usb agp biosbootspecification

     *-board UNCLAIMED

          description: Motherboard

          product: W870CU

          vendor: CLEVO CO.

          physical id: 2

          version: Not Applicable

          serial: Not Applicable

          slot: Not Applicable
```

Now to find a manual that describes what the 2-3-4-2 beep code means.

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