Problems with the Keyboard, Touchpad and On-Screen Mouse Pointer Flickering

Hi,

I have a 4 year old Dell Inspiron 1564, which has been working fine, till now.

I've had this problem for some months, although sometimes it goes away on its own. The issue begins when I boot the computer and the Dell logon screen prompts me to press a button in order to load the operating system. Sometimes it is accompanies by a series of beeps, sometimes 7 short beeps, sometimes 2 long beeps. Thankfully the beeps are not happening anymore. The problem begins when I start typing. The application freezes for a while, just around the time the touchpad gets stuck on the screen and when it recovers the mouse pointer is flickering like crazy. Also, during exactly this time, some keys in the keyboard stop working. The keys are - Left CTRL, F1, F2, Number 5 over the qwerty. number 8 on the numeric keypad and Home buttons. Strangely ALT+Left CTRL+Del still works and pressing the above keys in combination with the same faulty Left CTRL, the keys work fine. Sometimes a reboot solves the problem, sometimes it doesn't. 

Also, the copy paste function does not work at times. This problem exists with Microsoft Office, Windows and Google Chrome. When using copy/paste in Office, it pastes a screenshot instead of the copied text. When I paste directly from the clipboard, the text is pasted stripped of all formatting. This is really driving me crazy.

Here is the list of things I have already attempted.

1. I've tried using a USB Keyboard and Mouse, as far as normal daily usage goes, it gets me by. But even an USB mouse, the pointer still flickers like crazy and all applications still freeze up. I've even cleaned my keyboard by disassembling it from the system, shaking it gently.

2. I have tried clearing cache memory to see if it helps solve the copy paste issue. I have a shortcut of %windir%\system32\rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks on my screen. I click on it whenever things begin to go crazy. It does not work all the time.

3. Next I tried killing rdpclip.exe and restarting to see if it helps, it worked fine for a few minutes then it all went down to hell.

4. I've also tried cmd /c “echo off | clip” and it hasn't worked longer than a few minutes. 

5. I've got a third party app called GetOpenClipboardWindow by Serenity Macros to check which applications are holding up the clipboard. It does not return an error message and only works for some time.

6. I've tried System File Checker and it repaired certain issues with my OS, but after a couple of hours, I still get the same problem.

7. I've checked the device manager for both the keyboard and touchpad. Everything seems to be in order.

Here are my tech specs

• Dell Inspiron 1564
• Intel Core i5 processor
• 4GB RAM
• Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 32 Bit
• Microsoft Office 2007

Please help. I am at my wits end trying to work this out.

Thanks,

rajashree.p