New Alienware 51m dead keyboard. Anyone Else?

Alienware 51m
CoreI7 8700 CPU
RTX2070 GPU
32gb Ram
NVME 256gb SSD

Well it lasted almost a whole month, I have had no issues with this laptop until this point. I have been playing some long BDO sessions. Last night i decided to give her a break, shut down laptop.. went to bed. Woke up this morning, turned it on, no keyboard detection. No Lights. Trackpad works, lights on that work, Lights on back work. External Keyboards work.

Booted her down to check to see if the ribbon cable had come lose, pulled it all apart, re-seated ribbon cable. Tried again, noticed that the second connection for the ribbon in the service manual is actually under the board, roughly where the CPU sits (Which i thought was an odd place to put it, what if the heat burnt it out or something?) not sure. either way i know i wasn't going to pull everything apart as well as the board.

Placed a call with Dell, they are sending a technician out to service it on Thursday, with a new keyboard part. I am curious if anyone else has had this experience with keyboards dying ? or am i the first person this has happened with.

Thanks Guys ! I am hoping when dude gets here on Thursday he pulls board up and goes, OH lol your ribbon fell out underneath. i would be happy with that, its possible the vibrations from my cooling pad shook it loose, i don't know but well find out. Either way glad its getting fixed.

 

I'm more inclined to think it's the motherboard, though without water damage, keyboards in laptops rarely fail. So i'd say this is pretty rare, yeah.

 

Ya... I thought the same thing.. I cant find anyone else with this issue, so im hoping i am a one off

 

You'd have to have a seriously unbalanced fan in your cooling pad for it to vibrate the ribbon cable out. My guess is its a defective solder joint on some part of the motherboard which has failed, but hopefully its just the keyboard.

 

Try pulling out the battery and CMOS battery and holding power for 30 seconds. This restored the track pad and keyboard on a Lenovo of mine, worth a shot.

 

Thanks Man ! ill give this a try when i get home from work, you know i thought about pulling CMOS when i had it open too ... At this point i honestly don't know if its bad board or bad keyboard, i could still be software related, its running BIOS 1.2.0 and its still early in this laptop's life cycle.

 

Sorry when i said fan, i meant the cooling pad under the laptop, it has a harsh vibration, and it makes alot of noise, its fairly old.

 

UPDATE: Tonight my keyboard came back, with lights, after i decided to uninstall Command Center, and reinstall, voila .. all fixed... So somehow, Command Center completely 100% killed my keyboard as a detected device, even at BIOS During boot. Reinstalled it, and my keyboard is back, not sure if i should still have this tech thats coming replace the keyboard or not, but it looks like it is 100% working.

 

I had the SAME keyboard issue, and it happened directly after updating command center yesterday and rebooting. In my case, uninstalling and reinstalling did not fix the issue. In fact after spending an hour on the phone with tech support, we tried twice and it didnt fix it. They are sending an RMA box today, but I'll try reinstalling command center one more time. Maybe an old version of CC.

Something weird going on with Command Center it seems.

 

Use DDU or CCleaner to uninstall Command Center. Clear Bios and reboot. Install old version last

 

I'll give that a try. Thank you. When you say "clear bios", do you mean unplug the battery or just use the bios reset feature in the bios menu?

 

Yes, I mean the battery method

 

I bought one of those Alienware mechanical gaming keyboards, I forget which one, the nicer of the two, over a hundred bucks cost wise

Took it home and within 5 minutes, I was putting it back in the box and taking it back to the store because what I like to do, as any rational person should is, as soon as I get new tech, i check for firmware updates and such ... Well, Alienware's firmware update to that keyboard completely bricked it. It was completely 100% unresponsive, completely dead. I have never in my life seen a keyboard get bricked by software. So this is clearly one of Dell's ongoing serious design control issues that their keyboards are so heavily reliant on software. Honestly it makes me wanna uninstall all the driver software from my computer so that it can't run a bad update and cause serious issues.

So sad.

but yeah, now that I think about it, it makes perfect sense that it's software, given my previous experiences. Glad you got it sorted.

 

The Commamd Center software is no longer available on the A51m support page for download. I have one from February though. Going to try that one.

 

Never update FW from AW. A update that creates more problems than a fix. Drivers are not needed anymore, just use generic drivers.

 

Weird, Yes mine was completely dead until command center said it had to download components, it started that process and then i noticed the keyboard came back ! I thought this cant be real LOL typed on it, and it worked, i now have no issues with latest command center update. I did have a RMA coming for on-site technician to replace the Keyboard but i have cancelled it, i also didn't want to grab a new laptop, because i have already upgraded this and tossed the ram it came with etc, and i didn't want DELL stealing my parts (Which they do often). Plus i have broken in this laptop now and i am satisfied with the thermals and performance i didn't want to gamble on a new unit.

 

Ya and unfortunately with the this new Area-51m without command center / software, you would have zero control over anything. I tried even adjusting fan speed in programs like HWINFO Etc, they have somehow locked it out, only CC works for lighting and fan speed.

 

Open MS STore and type AW Command center to download full suite incl. drivers and other things.

 

Thanks a bunch for the assistance, guys. Unfortunately, the Command Center reinstallation didnt work for me. Uninstalled everything using CCcleaner, wiped bios, did full power drain and reinstalled AWCC every way I possibly can. I even reinstalled Windows from the recovery partition.

Unfortunately, I was not given an option to NOT update. I opened CC to adjust my lighting and was immediately presented with an "updating components" screen. Once that finished, a restart was required to use CC. After rebooting, the keyboard failed. Very strange.

 

RMA that ASAP. They might deny RMA if you're late or waiting for fix.

 

I am now having this exact same problem. Keyboard just completely stopped working/no lights. Did he have to replace yours?

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