Keyboard goes quirky, then BIOS beep codes

[SenorZorro]

Hey

I've been suffering from this problem for some time now, a year at least. I play Hedgewars and GTA2 (the latter through wine) quite often. While playing Hedgewars, my laptop will often (once per 3 games average) do something very strange. What normally happens when you press and hold a key while typing, for example "y", is that the character "y" is written, then a short pause for lets say 200ms, and then the character "y" is repeated at a defined rate, lets say 25 times per second. Now when this error happens, the effect is that my laptop seems to ignore the first "y", and after a pause during which no character appears, suddenly a whole series appear. Impossible to write anything. Even if I go to a TTY they keyboard still behaves like that.

Technical probably unimportant detail: In fact it might ignore more than just the first character. The characters that do finally appear seem to be those that have been entered a fraction of a second ago, instead of being entered and shown in real time. How do I know? Because as soon as I let go of "y" some characters still appear, and also I am unable to enter just two "yy" character where the first one would have appeared immediately if my system was working normally, and the second after the 200ms break, after which I let go of the "y" key. When the system is quirky, I can't seem to get any less than about so many characters to appear: yyyyyy

What triggers this? I don't know. I have noticed the system doing that quite often while playing Hedgewars, and very rarely while playing GTA2. Never elsewhere. I don't play any other games. I make use of photography software that uses the GPU, and never experienced this. I sometimes use OpenGL desktop effects in KDE4, never noticed this happening because of that either. I can't reliably reproduce.

How do I undo this behavior? I can't get rid of it without rebooting. I tried keeping a tail -f on /var/log/dmesg and messages, and haven't noticed anything at all appearing when this error triggers. When I reboot, the BIOS makes four error beep codes: 2-3-4-3. I can't find what they mean. The store I bought the laptop from no longer exists. I also forgot what the motherboard model is, please remind me, how can I check it? After the error beep codes, nothing happens, black screen, the BIOS doesn't proceed to load. I have to unplug the power cord, then the laptop turns off (my battery is faulty, so no power cord = no power) and when I plug the power cord back in it's as if nothing bad ever happened, everything works fine, until the next fail while playing HW/GTA2.

How do I trace it down? How do I check what motherboard model I have? What could possibly be the problem?
I've tried various Xorg and nvidia-drivers versions over the months. This laptop is under 2 years old. I don't remember when I first saw the problem, but I don't think it was there since the beginning.

Current specs:
Clevo W870CU laptop
Gentoo Linux x86_64
gcc-4.5.3-r1, glibc-2.12.2, kernel gentoo-sources-3.1.0-r1
nvidia-drivers-290.06
GPU: GeForce GTX 285M
CPU: Intel Core i7 820QM
RAM: 2 x 4GB SODIMM 667MHz
HD: Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB internal hard drive - 300 Mbps - 7200 RPM
kde 4.7.3

All help most appreciated!

[gerard27]

Most probable: a heat problem.
Gerard.
_________________
To install Gentoo I use sysrescuecd.Based on Gentoo,has firefox to browse Gentoo docs and mc to browse (and edit) files.
The same disk can be used for 32 and 64 bit installs.
You can follow the Handbook verbatim.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

[SenorZorro]

Nope, my laptop runs cool.

[SenorZorro]

Bump

[WorBlux]

Running lspci as root should give you an idea as to the motherboard model.

I would check to make sure there aren't any BIOS updates that mention fixing something like this.

Another thing I might play with is power and interrupt interface options in the BIOS, but that's just a wild ass guess really.

[SenorZorro]

Wild guesses are all I have to go on :]

I removed the laptop's battery, the error hasn't happened since then but I'm not celebrating just yet, need to test for a few days more.

[BitJam]

[SenorZorro]

ps. the motherboard name it gave me is the same as the laptop model - Clevo W870CU