churchh@ut-emx.uucp (Henry Churchyard) (03/17/91)
My AT-compatible has the following syndrome: sometimes when you
press certain keys (particularly RETURN and ESC) the computer spends
several seconds entirely occupied in beeping at you (everything else
comes to a temporary halt). These are the same symptoms that you get
when the keyboard buffer is full, but ---
1) After the beeping ends, the program is only aware that
a single keystroke has been pressed, so the keyboard buffer
probably wasn't actually full
2) The key wasn't depressed long enough to fill the
keyboard buffer with typematic repeats anyway.
When this syndrome happens at the DOS prompt, I just get several
seconds of beeping and temporary delay, but in some applications
programs which deal with the keyboard at a lower level (but don't
necessarily totally bypass the INT 9h interface), the program just
hangs, making a hardware reset (cold reboot) necessary.
So my questions are:
1) Is it the hardware (keyboard) or software (BIOS) that is
most likely the problem?
2) Is there an AT-compatible-keyboard BIOS that I can load
that would totally replace my ROM BIOS, so that I can test the
hypothesis that my BIOS is flaky?
Thanks!
Please-E-Mail-As-I-Do-Not-Usually-Read-These-NewsGroups-But-I-Will-
Summarize-If-There-Is-Sufficient-Interest ;)
--
--Henry Churchyard churchh@emx.cc.utexas.edu