ESC, F3, F5, F6, F7, keys are not working.

Hello guys,

I have an Acer Aspire 5755G running on Win7 x64 (i5, nvidia gt540m, 8GB ram), and for a few days now I'm having problems with the following keys:

ESC, F3, F5, F6, F7, F9, F10, F11

When pressed, they don't work. The only functions keys that are working are: F1, F2, F4, F8 and F12, which is kinda weird since the others are not functioning.

Here's what I tried so far:

-Installed latest Launch Manager

-Installed latest display drivers (read on some forums that can be an issue)

-Tested the keys in Safe Mode

-Tested it in BIOS (for example I cant use ESC in bios or F5/F6 to change things)

-Shut down the laptop from the power button, removed battery, plugged it back in.

-Used an external wireless keyboard.

All of the things that I tried above, resulted in failure. I can't for the life of me figure out what's wrong after hours of searching the web and trying different things. I also don't have a system restore in place (I know, not a good idea) to test it out from a previous build.

Any ideas or tips would be greatly appreciated. The only thing I haven't tested so far: Updating BIOS (No idea if that would fix it, also I know not to mess with BIOS updates unless strictly needed, don't know if that would fix anything or not. Also I haven't tried formatting and installing a new OS, simply because it would take me a day or so to backup everything and I thought this was a small issue. But if anything else fails, I guess I will have to try these last 2 things too.

Thanks in advance,

Stephen

Accepted answers

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JackE

What do you want the F-keys that don't seem to work, to do? How do you know they don't work? Have you tried, for example, to press Fn+F11 to see if the number lock will toggle on and off?. Or perhaps Fn+F3 to toggle your wireless adapter on and off?

Jack E/NJ

Stepic

JackE wrote:
What do you want the F-keys that don't seem to work, to do? How do you know they don't work? Have you tried, for example, to press Fn+F11 to see if the number lock will toggle on and off?. Or perhaps Fn+F3 to toggle your wireless adapter on and off?

Jack E/NJ

They simply don't work at all. For example if you use f5 you can refresh a webpage, its not working. If I use fn+f6 to turn off display for example not working.

+ The main issue, ESC key is not working.

Tested it with mskey, typing any of the fn keys and esc doesn't show up as being "pressed". So basically they do absolutely nothing.

Same issue with external keyboard which is odd. And yes I tried fn+f11 many times.

Thanks,

Stephen

JackE

OK. Did this seem to happen all of a sudden? Have you tried to load bios defaults and save changes to exit yet?

Jack E/NJ

Stepic

Yes kinda all of a sudden (maximum 1 week). I don't have a system restore point tho, so I can't roll back to see if it will work.

I tried going into bios, but changing any settings will need my keys: f5/f6 to work, so I don't think that i can do anything there either.

I'm thinking of flashing the latest bios, but I don't know if that will solve anything or not. So far these are my latest options, bios upgrade and a new windows install. But I wanted to see if I can fix this without doing these critical steps first.

Thanks,

Stephen

Stepic

Ok small update:

I tried loading bios default, nothing happened, still not fixed. Also it seems that I can't even flash a new bios properly from DOS as I can't use f5/f6 in bios to move up my usb drive to no. 1 boot option.

Thanks,

Stephen

JackE

>>>Same issue with external keyboard which is odd.>>>

At this point, you have an annoying keyboard behavior, not a bricked machine. So please don't try to flash the bios or any other similarly drastic measure just yet. Afterall, your existing bios firmware worked just fine for quite some time till recently.

Was that an external USB keyboard? Also does device mgr reveal any hardware issues?

Jack E/NJ

Stepic

Ok, well i havent updated bios yet since i couldnt boot into it.

Yes i used a wireless keyboard with usb receiver (all the keys are working fine on it except for the same keys that are not working on laptop either).

In device manager i have just 2 issues with base system device on other devices category (yellow exclamation point thingie) but i know for sure that i had those 2 issues for a long time even when the keyboard worked perfectly.

Regards,

Stephen

JackE

Does the USB keyboard seem to be at least semi-functional at the bios menu leve? That is, does it seem to behave exactly like the internal keyboard at the bios menu level? Do you hear any bios POST beep error codes on a cold boot and before the Acer logo screen appears?

Jack E/NJ

Stepic

Ok, i checked bios with the usb keyboard, I can use f5/f6 to change settings with it inside bios.. so thats good.

Now the problem is that the ESC key is still not working even with the usb keyboard inside bios.

Now I realized that trying to use keys such as q w e r, y, i , o , p is not working with the external keyboard.

This gets more complicated the more we dig into it lol.

Also no beeps/sounds. The only time I got a beep was when I tried earlier to use F12 and try to boot my usb flash drive, it beeped a few times and then the screen went black and it kinda got stuck there for like a minute (fans stopped too), so I power shut it down... dunno if this is related tho.

Thanks for the help so far, really appreciate it.

Stephen

JackE

OK. I ***guess*** I'm starting to lean toward a bios setting issue. So please check each bios maintab and note the options selected, detected or grayed out thereunder. Do they all seem correct to you? Or do some seem outright wrong or questionable?

Jack E/NJ

Stepic

Hi Jack, sorry for the late reply, I've been a bit busy yesterday.

Anyway I don't see anything unusual in my bios settings, I mean I only have 3 tabs: Main, Security, Boot, (ofc Information and exit)

The funny (or bad) thing is that I've just flashed a portable linux version on my usb drive, and booted it up, the keys are not working in there either. So at this point I can at least suspect that windows is not the problem, and it's maybe bios or motherboard related... no other ideas at the moment.

I've grabbed 3 photos with my phone from the 3 main tabs, but I don't think there's anything unusual there:

boot.jpg

main.jpg

security.jpg

JackE

>>>Shut down the laptop from the power button, removed battery, plugged it back in.>>>

Before trying anything more drastic, perhaps it might be worth a try to repeat the above except press & hold the power button for a minute or so before plugging it, and the battery, back in.

Also, have you peered inside the memory compartment to see if there are bios re-set jumper pins on the MB? Should be somewhere around the periphery of the memory modules so you should not have to remove the modules.

Jack E/NJ

Stepic

I tried the first method a few days ago and it didn't help.

I will try the 1 minute hold one a bit later as I have some projects opened that I'm working on and can't do it right now.

Will also check the memory thing and let you know.. in an hour or so.

I really do appreciate your help and tips... hopefully something will work.

Thanks,

Stephen

Stepic

Hi Jack,

I've tried the 1 minute power button hold (kept it pressed for like 3 minutes or so). It didn't work.

Here's an image of the jumper pins, I'm guessing these are the ones?

Thanks,

Stephen

media-20160630.jpg

JackE

Sorry, I don't see the pins. Should be 3 pins in a row, 2 of which are connected with a small removable jumper. If you don't see them along with the small jumper, the mainboard probably doesn't have them.

Jack E/NJ

Stepic

Yup, I know what you are saying now.. Had to google it and see how it should be looking.

I don't have them around the memory / hard drive compartment tho, so I think it's inside and I would have to open up the whole laptop to get to them, I would preffer not to do that, since I'm not that knowledgable with hardware, I'm more of a software guy.

Thanks for your help tho, I really appreciate it, even tho we couldn't find a fix to it.

Regards,

Stephen

JackE

>>>I'm more of a software guy>>>

Your USB keyboard acted similarly to the laptop keyboard ***except*** for the F5/F6 behavior in the bios menu. If it were mine, before resorting to bios recovery or flashing software that could brick the machine, I'd hafta try to re-seat the keyboard ribbon cable to the mainboard a half-dozen or so times just to make sure the contacts were clean and well seated. Easier said than done with all the plastic catches holding things together. But if your game to try, google the keywords "5755g" "disassembly" "keyboard" "youtube".

Jack E/NJ

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