kyt@cs.columbia.edu (Kok-Yong Tan) (02/11/90)
I'm having a problem that plagued me before, stopped occurring for several months and is now back again: I have an Apple extended keyboard and mouse connected to a Mac IIx. The keyboard and mouse sometimes freezes up such that it refuses to accept input from either keyboard or mouse. When it happens, I notice that all three LED's for num, caps and scroll lock illuminate (even though the caps lock key is NOT locked down--pressing the caps lock key a couple of times does NOTHING to the LED's: they remain lit). The freeze-up can occur in the middle of anything or nothing at all (i.e. when running a program like a word processor or when the Mac is just sitting idling with nothing but the desktop online). I originally thought it might be my screen-saver causing the problem but I've tried Pyro!, Dimmer (by Screen Gems) and After Dark. It occurs no matter which screen-saver I use. Then, for no reason, it stopped happening for about three months with no change in my routines or program use patterns and now it's back again. I'm beginning to hear the Poltergeist actress' voice saying "They're ba-a-ck." :-) I've tried rebooting using the reboot switch but sometimes the problem clears up and sometimes it reboots into the same frozen state. In desperation, I've tried yanking out the ADB connector from my keyboard while the Mac is running and that seems to work most of the times that I've tried it. However, I realize this to be a rather dicey thing to do. I'd like to know what the heck is happening to my keyboard so that I can either do something about it or tell my local Apple dealer what to repair. I've tried talking to my local Apple dealer but I don't appreciate paying them $50 just so that they can scratch their butts, say "Duh! Beats me." and then return my keyboard to me with nothing done or with some damage that wasn't there before. Any help would be appreciated.