Escape key waking computer from sleep

I unplug my power supply to the PC at night and it is set up to sleep at night and discharge the batter which prolongs its' life, but have ran into a problem.

The Esc key has messed up and activates on its' own. I remapped it to F6 and disabled it, and that works fine when working on the PC, but the problem is mechanical and still activates in sleep mode and completely discharges the battery. Does anyone have any ideas, the keyboard is impossible to work on?

I want to make sure that I understand this correctly:

Are you saying that there is a problem with the keyboard which basically causes the ESC key to act like it is being pressed?

If that is the case, then you might try connecting an external keyboard and disabling the internal laptop keyboard. Here is an article with some ideas on how to accomplish that:

How to Disable a Laptop Keyboard in Windows 10

Now, on to the issue that has me curious. I can understand unplugging a laptop at night, but what do mean by and discharge the battery? When in sleep more the battery should barely discharge overnight. Why not simply shut the computer down or perform a hibernate?

If that is the case, then you might try connecting an external keyboard and disabling the internal laptop keyboard. Here is an article with some ideas on how to accomplish that:

I use my laptop continuously as a laptop and a remote keyboard would not fit in with my habits.

I can understand unplugging a laptop at night, but what do mean by and discharge the battery?

I have had to replace a couple of batteries because I left them plugged in all the time and then I found out that lithium ion batteries like to be exercised. Tips for extending the lifetime of lithium-ion batteries

Why not simply shut the computer down or perform a hibernate?

I prefer not to use hibernate because it likes to eat up the hard drive.

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This thing isn't fixed, but found a "work-around". After continually playing with the key, I found that pushing it to the left stopped the erratically closing menus and the like, so I took a thin plastic wedge and shoved it down beside the right side of the key and with F6 now acting as Esc, everything is satisfactory for now.

The whole problem with this is that HP set up the Esc key as their entry into BIOS and that was major, but after playing around with that, I found that there are several ways to bypass Esc:
Press and hold F1 or F2 on boot.
Press F9 or F10 on boot, they work immediately.

Yeah, there's a lot of misinformation about LiIon batteries. Leaving them at a full charge for extended periods of time does reduce their lifespan, but so does using them! What I mean by that is that cycling them, even if only to 50% and charging again repeatedly will wear out a LiIon battery even faster than leaving it charged. LiIon batteries only have a few hundred charge / discharge cycles, may up to 1,000 cycles on a particularly good assembly.

I like what some of the manufacturers are doing now where you can set the system to stop charging when it reaches a certain level of charge.

Finally, as far as hibernation goes, if you are thinking about wear on an SSD, that concern is probably way overblown. The amount of data written to an SSD during hibernation is not going to adversely affect the life of an SSD. Do the calculations, you may be amazed how little an impact it has. I have a system with 128GB RAM and I hibernate that system on average about 2 times a day, every single day.

In any case, I'm glad you found something to help the situation with the keyboard. If it's a laptop you use a lot, maybe it's worth replacing the keyboard.

hsehestedt said:

If it's a laptop you use a lot, maybe it's worth replacing the keyboard.

I looked at replacing the keyboard on youtube and it is a complete nightmare, you have to take every screw in the PC out and there must be 30 of them - need a road map to get them all back in and at this point, I can't even find one that has a complete matching model number. At least to say, this is my first and last HP, I have used Dells for the last 20 years and they are still running with no problem, they are just out of date with their hardware, especially the hard drives.

Sorry to hear that. Yeah, laptops can sometimes be a nightmare to service.

It's funny the different experiences people have.

I had a Dell that I really liked - spent over $3,000 on it, but I got the worst service Dell. I'll save you the details, but it took over 8 months to get service for a system with a known problem where Dell had an article detailing a known flawed chipset. That was about 5 years ago, but I vowed to never own a Dell again.

Ironically, I went from a Dell to an HP Spectre which I still have today, and I absolutely love that machine, In fact, I'm typing on it now.

I'm sure my experience was not the norm, just a frustrating situation for me.

I hate computers, so why do I have a nervous breakdown when something happens to one of them????