Forums | MacLife

The aluminum keyboard I recently bought has turned out to be erratic but has worked fine the two times I took it back to the Apple Store. The problems include the following but do not necessarily co-occur: the q, a, and z keys will not type caps; the brightness control turns the screen to the lowest level and when I click to increase brightness, the screen quickly ratchets down to dim again and the icon for the screen brightness stays on the screen; when I am using Google to find material on Safari and click on a website, some sites download as an html rather than opening; sometimes the keyboard types odd characters rather then the ones I selected; sometimes the commands for sleep and shut down do not work. And sometimes the keyboard works fine, as it has at the Apple Store.

I am using the keyboard on a G5 and I don't think the problem is in the computer. When I switch to my old keyboard, or another keyboard, things are fine. On the other hand, when I tested the troublesome keyboard on two other computers, both iMacs (one purchased last Sept, another last May), the keyboard again was problematic.

On my second visit to the Apple Store, one of the Geniuses suggested that some of the settings in the keyboard system preferences had gotten changed (that would  not explain why the computer worked fine when I switched keyboards). I tried restoring defaults. This seems to do the trick on one occasion but has not worked subsequently. Does anyone know what is wrong? How do I show the Apple Store folk that the keyboard is defective and needs to be replaced?