Keyboard key ghosting test: Is this accurate?

Found a thread about keyboard ghosting here.

What you do is hold down both Shift keys, and then type out "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".

THUIKBROWNFOJUMPSORTHLAYDOG

I am using the late 2014 Alienware 13 laptop, and no external keyboards. Apparently, even the spacebar doesn't register well. According to the thread linked above, my keyboard sucks.

 

It's a common thing with pretty much any keyboard around.

Every keyboard suffers from ghosting in some way. The way a keyboard works is that there are two sets of wires, one sets that horizontal (rows) and one set thats vertical (columns). When you press a key it creates a short and thats how the computer recognizes which key is pressed. However, if you press another key that falls into the same column or row it creates two shorts and now the computer is confused as to which key you meant to press and that's called ghosting.

Now there are ways around this. The most common one is to make sure important keys are placed on separate columns and rows and that way if you press them all at the same time (upto the maximum number of keys the communication protocol supports) they will be read correctly. But this doesn't really fix the problem it just moves to another set of more obscure keys.

Another way to solve it is to add multiple different sets of wires but that makes the keyboard more complex and more expensive.

So no it doesn't necessarily mean your keyboard sucks...well unless you're planning on playing games and pressing both shift keys as well as one of the following keys:

C, E, Q, V, X, Z and the space bar

Because those are the keys that create a shared short in the keyboard.

 

Thanks.