Question Weird hardware bug on Chinese Mini PCs ?

[EmbeddedSystemGuy]

I have seen the same weird bug on three different Mini PCs from three different manufacturers. The problem was that normal letter keypresses would be converted by each PC to their control-key values. For example, a lower case "s" would be converted into a "control-S" value. This substitution occurred about once every 200 characters typed, but not consistently. Sometimes it was in the same sentence and I even saw it happen twice in a row. It would happen for any character. When typing in Notepad, this is very disturbing because a lot of control keys pop up windows like open-new-file, search-and-replace, select-all, etc. It would happen in any application where I was typing some input. In Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.

The first PC was from Kingdel, the second was from Minisforum, and the third from Geekom. All three had to be returned to Amazon after trying to find a solution with the manufacturer's technical support team. I know I wasn't accidently hitting a control key, because I built small shields to cover them! PowerToys was not installed, so there was no key remapping. In the last case, I even built a Windows 10 iso flash drive to load Windows 10. The bug was still there. Tried multiple good keyboards. Tried changing USB ports. Finally, I just gave up on mini PCs, and bought a Dell Inspiron. I've been running that for several days now, and I have not seen a single instance of this bug.

All three were generation 11 or 12 Intel i5s. Was this a bug in the chipset all of them were using? Was it because my cellphone was too close to these little mini cases? How come I don't see it with the Dell?

 

[helpstar]

which chipsets were they using?
had an issue like this on a laptop, where the HID event filter driver was bugged in windows and an old version fixed it

 

[EmbeddedSystemGuy]

Don't know about the Chinese minis, since they have all gone back to Amazon. I'm running a 13th generation I5 now with all Intel devices and latest updates from Microsoft. I'm actually seeing this same bug on this Dell Inspiron now. It doesn't seem to show up until I've had it running for about 12 hours, but it feels cold and the fan is not in high speed mode. No gaming or video even. Just typing in Notepad. At this point, I'm wondering of the keyboard is picking up RF from my cell phone that's about 8 inches away. I'm going to try shutting down my cell phone.

 

[EmbeddedSystemGuy]

Not RFI from the cell phone: My phone has been turned off, and the same bug persists. Including the dreaded control A event that selects the entire text file, and then the next character typed replaces the whole file! That seems to be the worst, so I'm tempted to download Power Toys to map a few of these control keys out. I do get Dell tech support with this computer, so maybe I'll try siccing them on the bug to see if they can come up with anything.