Do you wish to learn how to solve the keyboard not working issue on an HP laptop? This is something that you may encounter on both old and new machines. Having your keyboard stop working can be rather frustrating, but it’s not too big a problem. There are a number of steps that you can take to try and resolve the issue. We are going to explore these steps in this post. Note that we wrote this article after encountering the problem on a new HP laptop. So, we are speaking from first hand experience.
Use the onscreen keyboard
If the keyboard on your laptop has stopped working, how are you going to carry out the instructions given below? The good news is that you can use the Windows onscreen keyboard.
In Windows 10, you can find this by clicking on Start and then scrolling down to Windows Ease of Access. Expand that and choose Onscreen Keyboard.
You will be able to press on this keyboard using your computer’s mouse. It’s not as effective as a real keyboard, but it allows you to enter the commands that are needed as part of the troubleshooting process.
Solution if your HP laptop keyboard stops working
The following is a list of possible solutions to the HP laptop keyboard not working issue;
- Restart your laptop
- Update drivers on the device.
- Reinstall keyboard drivers
- Remove conflicting drivers
- Reset your hardware
Restart your laptop
This is probably the simplest of solutions to the HP laptop keyboard has stopped working issue. In most instances, hardware and software issues on a computer can be resolved through a restart.
Everyone knows how to restart a computer, right? Is it a simple matter of turning it off and on? What we wish to do here is to fully restart your computer.
You can do this by pressing and holding onto the power button. That’s the way to hard shut your laptop down. You can then restart it using the power button.
Another option is to open Start on your laptop, before going to the Power button. Next, click on Restart. Doing this completely restarts your machine, as opposed to what happens when soft shuts it down.
Update keyboard drivers
It’s important to keep all drivers on any computer updated. Drivers serve as the interface between the Operating System (OS) and hardware components on a computer. They are the ones that tell hardware components how to operate.
Should there be an issue with your drivers, some hardware devices, such as keyboards, may stop working. That’s why drivers are an important port of call when it comes to resolving keyboard not working issues.
Most drivers are updated via Windows Update. So, if you keep your computer up to date, all the drivers will probably also be up to date.
However, it’s possible to check for updates for individual drivers on your PC. To update keyboard drivers, you need to do the following;
- Right click on the Windows icon to the bottom left of your screen.
- Click on Device Manager.
- Next, click on Keyboards to see currently installed drivers. In our case, there are two drivers marked as HID Keyboard Device and one marked as Standard PS/2 keyboard.
- Right click on each of these drivers and choose Update driver.
- Choose Search automatically for updated driver software.
- Windows will now look for updated drivers for your keyboard.
Reinstall keyboard drivers
The next step that you can try to should the ones outlined above fail to resolve the keyboard not working issue is to reinstall keyboard drivers on your laptop.
Reinstalling is sometimes enough to resolve errors that may have occurred on your computer’s drivers. To reinstall the drivers on your laptop, you need to open Device Manager as outlined above.
Go to Keyboards and right click on each of the drivers that are on there. Choose Uninstall device. Do not tick the option to completely remove the driver from your computer.
After you have uninstalled all your keyboard drivers, you need to restart your laptop. Your drivers will now be reinstalled. Hopefully, that will have resolved the issue.
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Remove conflicting drivers
Keyboard failures on computers may also be due to conflicts between drivers. Perhaps you had another keyboard installed on there. That could have caused a conflict with your laptop’s keyboard drivers.
To resolve this issue, you need to go into Device Manager. Next, go to Keyboards and check to see if there are any drivers on there with a yellow error warning mark. That was the case in our case.
Should you find a driver showing an error, right click on it and choose Uninstall driver. Tick the option to remove that particular driver from your computer. When you are done, you can now restart your computer.
Reset computer to resolve the keyboard not working issue
Another way through which you can resolve the keyboard not working issue is by resetting your computer’s hardware. This option has worked great for a lot of people.
What you need to do is to remove the power cable from the laptop. Next, shut down the computer. Once it is off, press and hold the power button for more than 60 seconds.
That works by resetting your laptop’s power. Sometimes you will have keyboard issues because the device does not know whether it is off or on. Taking the above steps helps by turning off the keyboard. You can then restart your computer the normal way.
Summary
In this article, we showed you the solutions to the keyboard not working issue. There are many potential causes to the problem. Your issue could be due to driver errors. It could also be due to hardware errors. Conflicts between drivers can also cause this issue.
The wide array of potential causes makes this a difficult to resolve issue. Fortunately, the problems that you encounter are not insurmountable, and you should be good do go by trying out the solutions outlined above.
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