Hi everybody,
I am having a problem with an HP Pavilion laptop model # hzd7168cl. I
will note that his is a multiboot system and this issue is present in
2000, XP, and Vista, but not DOS 6.22, Ubuntu, Suse, or even OS X (yes
you read that right, I have 7 bootable systems on this machine). For
the purpose of simplification, I will limit this post to XP Pro as it
is my primary system. The issue is that the onboard keyboard and
touchpad stop responding intermittently. For example, as I type,
every few seconds a few letters are dropped completely. Needless to
say that this is very infuriating as I have to constantly reenter/
correct text input. As to the touchpad, it simply stops responding
and then resumes. The issue does not occur with an external mouse.
This interruption is accompanied by a faint grinding noise similar to
the sound an optical drive makes when it finds a bad sector. This
system has all updated BIOS and drivers and the OS is fully updated
and patched.
I have searched for many, many hours over several months and found
newsgroups where people have mentioned similar issues, but none has
suggested a cause much less a solution. Finally, after nearly going
insane with rage and on the verge of simply purchasing a new machine
even though I really didn't want to, I started going through through
every single process and service and disabling them one by one. To my
chagrin, even with only essential processes running, the issue
remained. I started analyzing the remaining processes an found
through process explorer that the System itself would draw a tiny
percentage of the CPU apparently simultaneously with these
interruptions. I opened the properties and found that the thread
responsible was ACPI.sys+0x10b57 I have conclusively proven this to
be the case as suspending the thread allows for normal operation of
the keyboard. After determining this, I recall that this issue may
have arisen at about the time I updated the BIOS for this system but I
am not certain.
All of this brings me to the question at hand. Does anybody know of a
way to remove the keyboard and touchpad from the ACPI name space or if
there might be a better solution. The workaround I have developed is
to simply suspend the thread as mentioned above. This is however a
clumsy procedure as I have to open process explorer upon logging in,
and if I forget to resume the process before shutting down, XP freezes
at the Windows is shutting down screen and I have to kill the system
with the power button. Also, I am not certain if any other onboard
devices are affected though I have not found any to date.
Any suggestions are appreciated. One idea I did have is to downgrade
the BOIS but I have been unable to find any previous BIOS versions
(current version is Phoenix BIOS: F.34 released 7/12/2004).
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