<p>Okay, unsurprisingly, our DD has managed to ‘turn off’ the physical keyboard and mouse on her 4 month old Acer Aspire V571 laptop.
She LOVES the touchscreen so she’s not so annoyed but I am. I NEED a real keyboard to type on.</p>
<p>She has special needs; good skills in some areas, computing not one of them!
She persists in exploring places she shouldn’t ie settings…and then she and we can’t fix.
Her brother has been patient and he restored her audio that went missing.
But the keyboard/mouse thing is not happening.</p>
<p>Any techies out there with ideas?
We’ve done the restore and that brought the audio back.
Hoping to not have to send it away…</p>
<p>I would try to get ahold of acer support maybe, but hitting on the right phrase in google will almost always work. Somebody somewhere else has done the same thing.</p>
<p>Look up the model number, or name and search for “turn acer PHANTOM keyboard on,problems with acer 943st8m keyboard,” or something to that effect. Usually within a handful of searches I can locate an answer to most problems. The key is trying different combinations in the search to find the phrase that pulls up the answers. If you aren’t a wizard getting the results from your web searches, recruit a young one to help out.</p>
<p>Thanks, raiders.
That IS the key, finding the right combo of words in google. I end up wasting a bunch of time because the words in my head don’t quite match the real world’s.
I’ll try your PHANTOM suggestion after work today…</p>
<p>Yes, our son, age 26, is our IT person. But he has a job and life now so his TAT is not good on this stuff.</p>
<p>I’d take a look at the keyboard, especially along the F-keys to see if there are any little pictographs of a keyboard (there will likely be ones with half-filled circles for brightness, zZz for sleep, a monitor for if you plug into a projector, etc). If you find one, hold the Fn key (usually between the bottom left ctrl and alt) and press the appropriate F-key.</p>
<p>I might also try using search terms like “enabling keyboard” with your laptop model. </p>
<p>I would stay far, far away from Acer products. The netbook I had had problems with the Wi-Fi and the connection to power the laptop became loose.</p>
<p>Well, ra8722, it’s a little too late for US to stay away from Acer products.</p>
<p>Actually, this is our family’s second Acer. The first is a little Netbook, going strong with no problems after almost 4 years. It’s my cruise the net while watching TV tool and I love it.</p>
<p>The Acer helpline is suggesting I sent the laptop in…was hoping it wouldn’t come to that.
It’s under warranty but still a pain.</p>