Keyboard Gone Dead!

on a prior laptop, i would occasionally hit some "turn off touchpad" button accidentally and spend a long time wondering why it had seized up. well, my current laptop (dell XPS 521S; win 10.0 home) has so such feature that i know of, yet i somehow managed just now to turn off the KEYBOARD in a similar manner!

FWIW, the touchpad kept working just fine. i could move around on the screen or highlight text...but then bupkis. couldn't do cut/paste b/c it couldn't see the "^C" input. and couldn't even do file saves -- even tho cursor could trigger pulldown and highlight "save file" no problem, it coudn't then handle the ENTER KEY i'd hit!

fixed everything via reboot, but this scares me. any clue what would trigger this? and how best to proceed if it happens again -- i feel lucky i didn't lose any data simply b/c of where i was at with those open files at the time. some other time this could have been disasterous.

 

I would check your touchpad settings in the Windows settings. This page may provide some ideas: Enable or Disable Touchpad in Windows 10 | Tutorials (tenforums.com)

 

Not finding that model number on dell.com. However, check your function keys. Any of them show a tiny picture resembling a keyboard? If so, hold down the fn button and that function key. See if you can lock/unlock your keyboard.

 

Connect a keyboard to a USB port, so you can get around where you need to figure out what has happened.