Hello, Please save my sanity!

I have a Sony Vaio laptop PC. When I press "TAB" i get (&%# on my screen. When I press spacebar i get LJHFD on my screen. This is happening on all programs on this laptop. Please help me with this frustrating issue. Thanks!

Sounds like a bad keyboard to me. There are programs you can google (say, "keyboard tester") for that will display a keyboard on your screen, and highlight the button you press; I'd guess if you were to do that, and hit the keys you mention, they wouldn't highlight.

It's been a long time since I worked on laptops, but keyboards were a fairly easy item to swap out. I don't know if that's still the case, especially with a Sony, as I've never worked on one of those before.

Also a new keyboard might approach the cost of just geting a new laptop, one option is to search for your model in ebay and see if somebody is selling one for parts.

Also google something like "sony (model) keyboard replacement" and see if you can find some instructions on how to do it. There might even be instructions on Sony's site about it.

Take all this with a grain of salt, I write software for a living, not repair hardware issues, so I could be totally off base here.

It's possible it's a virus as well, I suppose.

Plug in a USB keyboard, see if it still happens. If it does, then it's a software thing. Might be a virus.... One of my co workers somehow turned on one of the accessibility accessories from Windows, and then her keyboard started not responding correctly. Couldn't figure out how she turned it on, but once I looked around, and saw it enabled turning it off immediately solved the problem.

This will sound totally bizarre, but press Num Lock once and then try typing as usual.

If you have the Sony Vaio PCG-K33, then my heart goes out to you. Keyboards for that notebook seem to have a high failure rate.

Should you need replacement parts, here is a great place to start for your Sony.

New keyboards are around 35 bucks. Anyone can replace one. They are flimsy to start with and fail often. Doubtful it is a virus.

Which brings up a point I'm sure isn't worth mentioning, but do not, under any circumstances, ever, not in a million years, not if the sun falls from the sky or the moon explodes into tiny fragments - take the thing to a certain store where something called "geeks" hang out in what I'm told are something like squads, and you can supposedly obtain the best purchases on everything.

Replace the keyboard yourself, if you don't want to do it then look through your rolodex for someone who will, or post here and I'm sure someone will help you through it.

Just my opinion.

Give us the blood details!

Me? If so -

First off a disclaimer that these are my own personal opinions, and are not necessarily endorsed or approved by the owners and/or operators of the forum/site.

Anyway, for starters the labor prices are ridiculous. IMO, they take advantage of customers who still think their PC's are complex devices which are beyond comprehension. And this goes for hardware, software, and performance issues.

It's a shame that most people still regard their PC as something that contains space shuttle grade technology. In all actuality, PC's haven't been that hard to repair since they very first arrived on the scene, and over time, have gotten much, much easier to repair. This is also a reflection of our throw away society, I suppose. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying it's wrong for a company to make a profit off of other people's lack of knowledge. After all, that's really one of the reasons we have an economy in the first place.

But there are ethical limits, and these people go way past the furthest reaches of that line. Their prices are the equivelant of a plumber charging $900 to change out a washer.

Also, they hype the "we come to you" angle way up... but don't mention how much that little gem costs. I could be wrong about this (since I've never called them) but I think the squad charges over $100 just to show up. I just went to check thier site for pricing - it probably wouldn't be listed anyway, but .... I couldn't find out as their site is down. Rofl.

My real beef was when a relative bought a laptop from them, stored about ... I don't remember... at least 40GB of family pictures on it (and of course, no backups). Then one day, Vista would start booting, almost get there, but then just hang. She took it in, they told her the hard drive had crashed, and if she wanted her pictures back it would have to be sent to a data recovery company, and the final cost would be at least $1200.

She brought it over to me, I booted it up using BartPE, accessed the hard drive just fine, and copied all her files over to a USB drive. Took about 10 minutes.

The reason they told her her hard drive had crashed was (I don't remember the exact message), but something in the BIOS indicated a hard drive problem. So the hard drive did need to be replaced, but it wasn't as if the heads had landed on the platters.

Anybody with any basic knowledge of a PC knows that if a PC at least starts to boot the OS, the hard drive isn't "crashed". Corrupted maybe, but not dead.

So, that's my second beef. Their policy (IMO) is to find the slightest excuse to justify work that simply isn't needed.

I'd like to see 60 minutes do a show on PC's like they used to do for cars and appliances, simply unplugging a cable, marking the major components with UV ink, etc... and then taking it in for repairs to different repair shops.

- Matt

--- double post deleted ---

Thanks. I love a good horror story. To get your laptop fixed, try a local non-chain computer shop that sells used laptops or go to a computer fair to find one.

There was a (I think) Florida-based news channel that did an under-cover PC repair scam story probably a couple years ago. Probably saw it on youtube sometime last year. They took a perfectly working PC, and had their tech pull the hard drive cable out. Brought the PC to a few big-name places, and a few mom-and-pop places. All but 1 of them wanted to replace the hard drive itself or worse, and the 1 that told it like it was was 1 of the mom and pop shops.

They all fixed the problem. Now you're just quibbling about the price. Seriously, folks ....