Keyboard Freeze on old laptop
 

Having problems with keyboard lock ups on my recently acquired old laptop. It's an old prostar 8300 (also sold as clevo 86) with 200mhz mmx and 32 mb ram.

The keyboard keeps locking up on me. I've tried it only with live distros (DSL, gentoo livecd, puppy, feather) and had the same problem in all of them whether or not I load a window manager. The lock occurs randomly, sometimes while typing, sometimes not, but in DSL the mouse still works although I can no longer open programs. Sometimes it happens a few mins after booting up sometimes when I am typing my first command.

I've tried disabling apm, acpi, booting with agpgart option. Machine runs win98 with no problems. Not a heat issue - I refrigerated the laptop till it was cool and it still locked up really quickly on my first boot. I've gone through the bios and turned off all the power management stuff - no difference.

It seems to me like the cpu locks as well, because I've had tasks hanging at the same time as the keyboard lock, but only occasionally.

Does anyone have any ideas???

-JTC