I've been dealing with an annoying issue for months where the Ctrl, Alt, and Win keys on my Windows laptop just won't work, and it's driving me crazy! I've tested with an external keyboard and even switched laptops, so I know it's not a hardware problem. Here's a rundown of what I've already tried:
- Used a keyboard testing site, but only those keys and F10 are unresponsive—everything else works.
- Merged a clean keyboard registry file to refresh it.
- Checked Sticky Keys and similar accessibility settings, but no luck.
- Looked at the Group Policy settings for the Windows key, but everything seemed fine.
- Tried booting in safe mode.
- Changed keyboard languages to reset settings, but the issue persists.
- Made sure Windows 10 is fully up to date.
- Even created a new user profile to see if the problem would resolve itself there, but it didn't.
I'm really hoping to avoid wiping my system and losing my data. Does anyone have suggestions on what else I could investigate within the OS to figure this out?
1 Answer
Have you checked what might have triggered this? Sometimes changes can cause issues. Try doing a couple of tests: open Notepad, and see if Ctrl+A highlights all the text. If it does, try Ctrl+X to delete it and then Ctrl+V to paste it back. Also, see if you can get into the BIOS and try Ctrl+Alt+Delete there. If nothing responds, something deeper might be at play.
I honestly don't remember any major changes before this started; it seemed to happen out of the blue. I’ll give the BIOS thing a shot but, to be clear, the Ctrl key doesn't work in any applications either.