Question Intermittent Keyboard Lag/Delay, Windows 10 [Updated, Maybe Solved]

[Invader115]

First off, I'm not sure if this is the right section. The problem is such that I don't know where it's supposed to go.

My system specs are at the bottom of this post.

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UPDATE 3/11/19: First off, I'm throwing out a lot of the original post. It was information overload, presented in a confusing fashion, and most of it's unlikely to be useful now that further testing has happened.


So, after trying everything listed lower in this post, I found a driver disc that came with my new motherboard and installed it. As I'd just moved over to a new CPU/RAM/motherboard combo with a fresh Win10 installation, I assumed having forgot to run the disc caused some problems that resulted in my keyboard strangeness.

The problem more or less went away for a week, but then it returned much worse than it was initially. Around 24 hours ago I threw in the towel and blew out my OS once again, totally reformatting the C: drive in the process. Since then, as far as I can tell, the problem's gone!

I've thought it was gone before, so I'm withholding most of my excitement, but it seems the hours-long OS blowout process was worth it. Fortunately, I've removed my OS and started over enough times over the years that getting my machine up and going as usual was pretty easy, but I also know not everyone is in a position to delete everything on their C: drive.

So, that's it: the most likely fix for this problem is the "nuclear option". Wipe out your OS and start over. If that fix isn't viable for anyone out there who has this problem, I'm sorry, but I don't have an ounce of mental energy left to spend on this.

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[Original post]

This issue has been consistently annoying me for the last several weeks and various attempted fixes have done nothing to change it. Seemingly at random, my keyboard will stop registering keystrokes for a number of seconds (different each time), after which it will send them all to the OS in the order they were pressed.

The problem happens, as far as I can tell, regardless of what the system's doing. It happens in everything from resource-intensive video games (where it's the most frustrating) to Microsoft Word and my web browser.


My main keyboard is a Razer Ornata Chroma, but other, generic keyboards have the same issue. I've tried moving the keyboard's USB plug to various different USB ports on and off the motherboard's panel and have seen no change whatsoever.

At first I thought it was a problem with Razer Synapse, so I tried the latest version of it; an older legacy version (Razer Synapse 2); and having it totally uninstalled, but none of those fixed it.

I tried going into Device Manager and unplugging my keyboard, uninstalling all the keyboard drivers on my system, shutting down the PC and plugging my keyboard back in after it was fully booted up again. The drivers reinstalled as they should but the problem saw no change.

A full-system virus scan using BitDefender Free, the antivirus I've been using for years, found nothing suspicious. A manual look through the processes running on my PC using the Task Manager turned up nothing obviously suspicious, but I'm far from an expert.


What I have NOT done is to boot into Safe Mode and see if the problem persists. That's because the random nature of the problem makes it difficult to test. I can't run games in Safe Mode and games are the most viable way to detect the problem.


System specs:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X
RAM: 32 GB DDR4-2666
Motherboard: ASRock B450
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti
OS: Windows 10 Home, Version 1803, OS Build 17134.590
OS Drive: Samsung 860 Evo SSD w/ 464 GB capacity & 158 GB free currently
PSU, in case it somehow matters: Corsair TX750M, 750 Watts


Any help is much appreciated.

 

[Ralston18]

In addition to Task Manager, remember you also have Resource Monitor to work with.

And for post-mortem (with the problem hopefully resolved) Reliability History/Manager and Event Viewer may have captured some related error codes, warnings, and even informational events corresponding to the keyboard problems.

Likely to be very apparent if, for example, there are multiple errors or warnings (red and yellow icons) that disappear just after the keyboard driver update.

Go back and look - may prove revealing and useful. Especially if the problem returns.

 

[Invader115]

Thanks for your reply. I halfway-forgot about this thread for a while but the problem, as it turns out, is not entirely gone.

It's far better now – it seems rarer and its duration hasn't exceeded half a second since I ran the motherboard's driver disc – but it's still there.

I'm only posting this to have it on the record, for anyone in the future who has this problem, that the motherboard drivers aren't a 100% guaranteed fix. I'll hit the Event Viewer and all that later and see what clues I can find.