Keyboard simultaneous button limitation?

[Dokujisan]

Ok, so I'm just setting up a basic gaming computer for my brother and I installed Nexuiz. It's running Vista Home basic, but I don't think that is the reason for my problem. I've seen this problem before with other versions of windows in the past.

I can only seem to push 3 buttons at one time on the keyboard. I notice this when I'm grappling while hitting the back and left buttons and occassionally jumping. That's four buttons max at any one time, but I can only seem to push (hold down) three at one time. The fourth one doesn't respond.

Is it the keyboard? This is some HP "Internet" keyboard from his last computer that has all of these extra buttons that nobody uses. I have a more simplified keyboard that I might try on his system to see if that fixes the problem.

Has anyone experienced this before? Is there anything I can do to fix it aside from replacing the keyboard?

[torus]

From Wikipedia:

Keyboards are less than ideal when many keys are to be pressed at once, as the simple keyboard circuitry means that only a certain number of keys will register at one time. A common side effect of this is called "phantom key blocking." Due to the circuit design on older keyboards, pressing three keys simultaneously sometimes resulted in a 4th keypress being registered. Modern keyboards prevent this from happening by blocking the 3rd key in certain key combinations, but while this prevents phantom input, it also means that when two keys are depressed simultaneously, many of the other keys on the keyboard will not respond until one of the two depressed keys is lifted.

That might be your problem. I use a dedicated gaming keypad, so it doesnt happen to me. Maybe Vista doesnt support your keyboard (god knows why you have vista, but thats your problem/choice) . Did you have the same problem with XP or linux with the same keyboard?

[esteel]

Its just what torus quoted from wikipedia. Some keyboards are made to save a few bucks and can only handle a few keys. I think most of the keyboard can handle wasd without problems but its very hard to find information about this.. i tried a few keyboards without luck and finally found info about two keyboards that have 'full n-key rollover'. one of them was the raptor gaming keyboard and the g15. Both are ugly but as i do not use wasd i need that much more so i did get the g15

[Psychcf]

if it's a wireless keyboard this could be one of the reasons why they prevent more then 3 from being for pressed. (limited bandwidth)

[Dokujisan]

Very interesting. Thank you very much for the info.

On Vista, it was my brother's preference. He just bought a laptop for his wife with Vista on it, and he wanted Vista on his gaming computer. It will be fine. I'll learn a bit about Vista and he will have support for DirectX 10 based games in the future. He'll have to upgrade his video card though.

It's not a wireless keyboard. It's some "fancy" HP keyboard that has extra buttons for things like email and search. Really stupid buttons that nobody ever uses.

I have a gaming keyboard that I bought a while ago that has extra keys on the lefthand side for the WASD and surrounding keys. It's a ZBoard MERC http://www.ideazon.com/us/products/merc ... yboard.asp
I got it with a gift card that someone bought me for Christmas. I tried using it with Nexuiz (on Linux), but it requires extra software for the extra keys to function. They don't have a Linux version of the software. It will also occassionally register a strange character that causes Nexuiz to Exit the game and go back to the main menu. Very strange. So I don't plan on using it. I'll probably donate it to his gaming rig.

Thanks again for the answers.