Keyboard problem on Acer Aspire 5670

A while back my sister's keyboard on her mini ASUS laptop (not netbook) started sticking keys  and sending other weird characters. She brought it over and since I had the same model laptop lying around, I just swapped the keyboard out with hers. I figured I could clean the keyboard and get it up and running on my laptop later.

None of the methods I used could fix the keyboard. As the laptop was a few years old, I decided to make it a desktop and attach a USB keyboard. I did this for a few weeks but found that performing IT work around town with just my iPod touch problematical. 

I dug around my parts bin and found an Acer 5670 that a customer left with me after purchasing an upgraded laptop. The hard drive was missing but I had a few laying around. I worked on putting the laptop back together, installing Vista Business, and performing some updates. During the install, I noticed the keyboard kept locking up. I seem to be having bad luck with keyboards lately.


I went to using a USB keyboard but quickly reached my annoyance limit. A few Google searches later, I stumbled on the problem. Once the battery degrades in the Acer 5670, the charging system draws too much power away from the keyboard. The keyboard falls below the minimum current needed and shuts off. Removing the battery will verify that the problem exists.

One of the fixes relates to disabling the Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method. If you click on Start then type devmgmt.msc, the device manager will open.

After opening device manger, expand the batteries area, right-click on Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery, and select disable. Mine currently says enable, but that's because I already disabled it.

Disabling the ACPI will also prevent power management from working but the laptop seems to work fine for now.

In case you would like a video of the entire process, I uploaded one to Vimeo. Click below...

 

Battery Fix from Jonathon Deringer on Vimeo.