Recently installed AutoHotKey to remap some keys in order to play a video game. It seemed simple/attractive enough at first. Was not really sure of how it worked but found the .chm file in the download which states in the first line of Usage & Syntax/Using the program:
AutoHotkey doesn't do anything on its own; it needs a script to tell it what to do.
Sounds 'secure' enough to me. Seems like mature software. Maybe overkill (now I know it certainly was overkill) but let's just see how it works.
My remapping was simple enough: change the AWSD keys for the LEFT-UP-DOWN-RIGHT keys. Script syntax is simple enough, just used an example that comes with the install files. Works essentially as expected. Got an annoying pop up after playing the game for a bit from AutoHotKey saying "you've pressed mapped keys 600 times" or something like that. Which was only a little annoying, so I ignored it the first few times. The game I play is real time so getting a even a 5 second interruption while in a match would mean certain loss, so I decided to just disable the script and uninstall.
Lo and behold: when I stop the script, the keys continue to be remapped. Was there some background process running? Maybe. I rebooted only to find that on my Windows login screen my keys continue to be remapped. Huh? Did AHK mess with some registry bindings or something?
I do not know that much about how Windows works, but my vague recollection is that registry bindings is something is active once the OS is active. I search on the web for say 1 hour before I give up for the time being and I end up activating the script again in order to write normally. This works as expected and I literally forget about it until any time I have to reboot.
Honestly a minor annoyance, but due to the world changing very quickly I lately have very few precious minutes that I can actually sit down on my desktop, whereas I used to be able to spend hours on this type of computer issue in order to get to the bottom of it. In other words, my current solution felt good enough. But not anymore. I think something more serious and possibly nefarious may have occurred. I don't want to seem dramatic but I just discovered something else a few minutes ago.
I have a Linux installation on another drive and I just happened to want to load it up after my last Windows blue screen (have gotten a couple of those lately, literally 2 in the space of 2 days and this had maybe only ever happened once before, like 2 years ago, so I am a already concerned about a possible deeper issue). My firmware/bios has a password and guess what I found when I tried inputting it: the keys were still remapped.
At this point I am at a complete loss. I didn't even think this sort of thing was possible. Some OS level software caused a change that was able to be reflected on the bios? Did it affect the keyboard driver? A driver that both windows and the motherboard bios use?
What else have I tried or looked at:
Device Manager claims my Keyboard has 3 instances of "HID Keyboard device". Not entirely sure why it shows 3. Properties show it has 2 driver files: kbdclass.sys and kbdhid.sys, which I suppose are some standard drivers. Not sure how to proceed.
My keyboard is inland (cheapest i could find at microcenter) i am not sure why I cannot find the website for that company. Found some drivers on reddit but they are on some sysadmin's google drive. I will download that exe when i am desperate...
UPDATE
I 'solved' the issue bye getting another keyboard (an old IBM KB-0225) and everything is now in order. I tried disconnecting the Inland keyboard and reconnecting, but after reconnecting I was still experiencing the same issue.
I don't know if I should close this question as there is no longer an issue, but I would like to see if anyone has any other additional theory as to why some software/driver changed occurred inside a keyboard device. As far as I knew, these devices have not internal memory other than possibly some logic gates.
There must be a background process running.
to check that:
note : For windows 10
On your taskbar, click on the ^ button (skip this step if there is no such button)
right-click on the sign.
click on "exit"
If the above steps do not work, try keeping a watch all the time, to see if you notice something uncommon.
Related
the other day my little brother downloaded a game from somewhere, and as I caught him in the act of installing it, I noticed a little pop-up window in, like old windows graphics, popped up all sneaky and said "be now on auto start" or something close to that. So, is there any way I can find out what that was, where it is, or what it's doing, so I can see if it's a virus? thanks for your time and effort. the spell checker wont let me type v before "be on auto start"
There is no surefire way to locate an unknown .vbe file that is currently running. However, some detective work may be able to uncover its location. Try checking recently accessed files, running processes, and open network connections to see if any clues can be found.
I use Windows-W for something else. For over 20 years now. The muscle memory is strong.
Enter Windows 10: Now, that key is intercepted.
I don't know by what, but my application (which i think is irrelevant to name) isn't receiving it. It's not even a new install, it's one of those programs that you can run out of a folder without installing, carrying it from computer to computer over the yeras. without any behavior ever being disturbed
Windows 10 has grabbed several keys this way.
It seems most solutions out there are about DISABLING the windows key entirely, or DISABLING a specific keystroke (like windows-w in my case).
I don't want it disabled. I want whatever windows is doing to it to stop, and let it pass through the way it did in Windows 7/2K/98/ME [yes going back that far].
A lot of time already spent on this unfortunately.
While I'm using my computer a blue window will pop up for a second then go away. The label said windows power shell, I've tried looking at the event viewer but I could not identify anything there since I'm a new user. What could be causing this?
Running windows 10
Sometimes installed programs open up command prompts to run services/init tasks, so its not completely unusual.
I've never seen it happen with powershell however.
it could be innocent and just a program you have installed running init behavior, but it could also be malicious.
the first thing to try is checking what programs are set to startup automatically. if there is a load of bloat, you could try turning off the unnecessary ones and see if it still happens.
but realistically the only real way forward is to get a good quality antivirus, and run a full system scan over your pc to double check. it wont give you 100% certainly as things could possibly get passed it, but realistically if it passes you should be fine
I have a new Win10 laptop. I've installed lots of software, including a 25-year-old Codewright editor that I've customized up the wazoo, and that I've been installing on all my machines for, well, 25 years. After working for a few days, it suddenly stopped, and reinstalling it didn't fix it. On startup, it puts up a small splash window, and normally opens the main window a half a second later (that took more than 5 seconds 25 years ago). It's not using any CPU, and there's nothing I can do but kill the process.
In the past, I've occasionally got my system into a state where Codewright would hang on loading, due to some other program that hadn't terminated correctly, and it was unfrozen by killing off that other process. So that's reason to believe that Codewright is waiting at some global lock which some other malfunctioning software is holding. So I have two questions:
Does this ring a bell? Is there some known failure mode where a program putting up a splash window then switching to another window can be prevented by something else going on the system?
Is there a way to diagnose this, perhaps by finding out what system call it's hanging inside? I tried dtrace.exe, started Codewright, and then stopped tracing, and it produced a 3GB XML file, which is quite a haystack. There's a way to filter it by PID, but since this is a startup problem, I have no idea what the PID will be. Is there a better tool for doing this, or some more appropriate dtrace feature that I missed?
The comment about using the Task Manager to create a dump file actually led me to notice that there is an Analyze Wait Chain function there that I had never seen before, since I haven't used Task Manager much since I switched from Win7. This gave me exactly the answer I wanted. My editor was waiting for something that was being held by some NVIDIA GeForce Experience module. Since I don't use that, I uninstalled it, and I'm back up and running. Thanks for the tip.
For a project of mine, I'd like to control (i.e. dim, set on or off) the little LED that sits in front of macbooks (and maybe other Macs, I don't know).
Unfortunately there's no API nor help about this on the internet - the only thing I could find was about dimming the keyboard LED. Apart from that, I only know that it would for sure use the SMC chip.
I'm OK if it needs root.
First thing, I must agree it is duplicate. But things have changed since 2010, and now it is possible to control this LED !
Take a look at xline. It's a project of mine, and it' s able to control the LED, through the SMC.
Just take a look at the source code.
BTW, I'm first opening a connection to the AppleSMC IOService using IOKit, then I'm setting the LSOO key in the SMC to 01. 00 shuts the LED down. And I use LSSB key to make it breathe, like when the MacBook is sleeping.