Broken keyboard - l33t!
From Telkoth.net
my keyboard freaked out last night. In the middle of typing an IM, the unfinished IM sent itself... three or four times all in a row. I quickly clicked to put the focus elsewhere, and attempted to gain control back over my keyboard, by which I mean I pressed a bunch of keys randomly.
That didn't help.
My first thought was "virus?" and then I mentally slapped myself for falling as low as the average computer user. I know better than that. Viruses aren't that clever anymore; all they do these days is piss off everyone in your Outlook address book.
Unfortunately - maybe it was the lateness, or maybe I was just flustered - I continued down this stupefied path of "reason", and thought to myself "I should reboot!" I tried plugging my keyboard in to other USB ports just in case, but that wasn't working.
As I waited for Windows to close down, I wondered if my keyboard had somehow broken... but when the computer came up and asked "Windows XP, or Recovery Mode," I instinctively hit "enter" to select "Windows XP," and then realized: hey! wait a minute, my keyboard's working fine! awesome! yay for rebooting!
But then something else happened... something terrible :P apparently I had scheduled a "chkdsk c: /r" some time ago - who knows how long, I rarely reboot - so before Windows would come up, it cheerily reminded me that if I wanted to skip chkdsk, I should really press a key before it counted from 10 to 0. "10... 9..." I pressed a key. "8... 7..." press, press, press! "6... 5..." fuck! So apparently Windows just didn't like my keyboard. Driver problem for sure.
Well fine, it was getting late, and as long as the computer started up it would still be able to run WinAmp at 6:00am to wake me up for work. I could try to fix the keyboard then. So I waited for chkdsk to run its course, and went to bed.
The next day I realized something terrible... even if I wanted to dink around with the driver for my keyboard, I wouldn't be able to enter in my administrative password without the keyboard... Windows has some accessibility options to let people use the mouse instead of the keyboard somehow, but I don't know how to enable those. At least, I thought, I could wait until after work and borrow Stephen's USB Apple keyboard. Hopefully that would work.
But then I had a better idea! I create accounts for all of my friends, and surely they hadn't all set up their password yet... I could get in, and use charmap to type in some search requests into Google and find out how to get accessibility options on.
Sure enough, my friend Katherine had never found a need to log in to my computer. I clicked on her name, and when I was asked to "change my password," I just hit "OK." Ta-da! In! It's a good thing I didn't have any sort of password complexity rules enforced.
I quickly learned that Katherine's account did not have permission to mess with the accessibility options, however I had another idea... perhaps if I click in my administrator password in charmap, I can copy it, log out, and then paste it in... but would Windows allow me to paste into a password field - sometimes it doesn't - and would the clipboard hold from user to user?
Fortunately the answer to both was "yes." Just to make sure, instead of logging Katherine out, I just did the "switch users" thing. Sure enough, I pasted the password in, and viola! Administrator access! Yay for Katherine not using my computer!
Opening up the list of devices installed revealed that damnable yellow exclamation mark all over my USB keyboard. I didn't look in to it much, but apparently there was some registry misinformation, etc, etc. Whatever. I uninstalled the driver, let windows reinstall it, and *poof*... a working keyboard!
I still don't know what the hell fucked up the bit of my registry pertaining to the keyboard driver, but as long as it doesn't become a habit, that's cool. And if it does happen again, at least the "rebooting never solves anything" mentality has been reinforced; as well it should! Just uninstall the reinstall the driver...
So anyway, there's my adventure from last night. Sorry if you were IMed an incomplete sentence 3 or 4 times last night... now you know why :P
