Prebuilt Laptop Keyboard/Touchpad Issues

August 20, 2019

I bought a refurbished laptop for my wife for going back to school several months back. The machine seemed to work fine except lately it's been having some issues when it comes to its keyboard and touchpad. If I had to describe it in just a few words, I'd say it 'spazzes out' when you try and type or click somewhere. Specifically, if a browser or Word document is open and you try and type some of the keys won't register at all. When they do, it seems like they're mapped to some sort of shortcut as random areas of the screen will act like they were selected, kind of like how you can hit Alt in Word and it'll highlight the menu. Sometimes the keys will register their actual strokes. The windows icon won't bring up the start menu and Control + Alt + Delete doesn't work. The same key won't do the same thing twice, like if I hit 'C" and it randomly opens a menu option, hitting 'C' again doesn't give the same effect. Combined, this makes more a VERY frustrating ordeal.

For the touchpad, double tapping on an icon opens up its properties instead of launching it, like Chrome or Word. The context menu (right clicking) goes away the instant I click it. If I click inside a text box to type something, it'll instantly 'click off' it and my cursor will disappear. I attempted to access her school email through a link on their homepage (it's meant to open up Outlook), however it DOWNLOADS an .htm file that simply named 'authorize' and doesn't open anything! If I don't do anything inside a browser, I can see the menu bar at the top gray in and out as if being selected and deselected.

This all seems like some kind of Malware, but I've scanned both online and offline and nothing. I've reset the PC, restarted and updated to the very latest Windows version (except 1903, I hear they're too many issues right now). As far as I know, nothing has been spilled or gotten under the keys. And the icing on the cake? It doesn't do it all the time, just randomly. Anyone have any idea would could be causing it to lose its mind?

HP x360 Pavilion

8GB RAM

256GB SSD

Core i5 8250U

Windows 10 x64