If you disable this service, you will lose all of the advanced function keys and the dedicated Armoury Crate and Microphone mute keys (while it is disabled). By default, it is set to automatically start when Windows does. That service is the ( oh so clearly named… albeit ironic 🙂) “Asus Optimization” service. One of those services in particular is responsible for managing the advanced functionality of the keyboard. I didn’t find any smoking guns in the event log however I did notice that Asus has a plethora of background services that run, most of which come installed with the “Armoury Crate” application. While I never tried doing a full system reset/recovery – None of the other items consistently fixed the issue for me.Īfter banging my head against the desk in frustration and not finding an answer anywhere online, I finally did a bit of windows sleuthing. Thankfully, I am pretty certain it was not, and I am typing this post from the laptop.Īsus has a YouTube video and an entire page on their support website dedicated to keyboard issues… which is rather telling… Those two resources will direct you to try uninstalling the driver for the keyboard, rebooting the machine, disabling “sticky keys” or resetting/recovering the entire machine back to factory. I was really concerned it was a hardware issue (like a short with some of the switches or the cable). I verified that when this issue was occurring, it also showed up in BIOS as well.Īfter dealing with this for a couple of weeks I also realized that when these keys were dead, so to were all of my special function keys (like adjusting keyboard backlight brightness or fan speed). Sometimes after holding the keys down they would suddenly all start working (until the next sleep/reboot/whatever cycle). Sometimes a reboot would fix the issue, sometimes not. It wasn’t just a matter of sensitivity, the keys were for all intents and purposes “dead.” Thankfully a USB Keyboard would work just fine but that really limits your portability. In my case it was the G, H, and E keys pretty consistently and occasionally the I key as well.

Often times after reboot, or waking from sleep/hibernation I would find that several keys on my keyboard would simply not function. I don’t want to turn this into a long post because if you show up on this page you are probably just looking for the fix.

However, one thing I was not prepared for was Asus and their lackluster firmware/drivers/etc. I really enjoy the light weight, relatively diminutive size and curiously long battery life of this machine which also packs a performance punch when needed.

I recently purchased an Asus Zephyrus G15 (2021) laptop with a Ryzen 9 5900HS processor and RTX 3070 GPU.

Asus keyboard backlight atk package