/usr/share/doc/kbd/kbd.FAQ-22.html (2433B)
Several people have noticed that they lose typed characters when a floppy disk is active. It seems that this might be a problem with Uni-486WB motherboards.
Tjalling Tjalkens (tjalling@ei.ele.tue.nl) reports very similar problems
with "a no-brand GMB-486 UNP Vesa motherboard with AMD 486DX2-66 CPU" -
during floppy activity some keystrokes are lost, during floppy tape streamer
(Conner C 250 MQ) activity many keystrokes are lost.
Some people experience sporadic lockups - sometimes associated to hard disk activity or other I/O.
Ulf Tietz (ulf@rio70.bln.sni.de) wrote:
`I have had the same problems, when I had my motherboard tuned too fast.
So I reset all the timings ( CLK, wait statements etc ) to more
conventional values, and the problems are gone.'
Bill Hogan (bhogan@crl.com) wrote:
`If you have an AMI BIOS, you might try setting the Gate A20 emulation
parameter to "chipset" (if you have that option). Whenever I have had
that parameter set to any of the other options on my machine
("fast", "both", "disabled") I have had frequent keyboard lockups.'
There may be a relation between keyboard problems and the video card in use.
Shawn K. Quinn (skquinn@wt.net) wrote:
`I have a Zeos Pantera Pentium-90 that originally came with a Diamond Stealth
64 S3-based video card. Under X I frequently got q's inserted into my text
(how annoying) especially if I typed very fast (during Netrek for instance,
even more annoying because guess what that does :-( ).
Switching to a Creative Labs Graphics Blaster MA202 solved the problem.
I'm assuming the Stealth 64 did something funny with the timings.'