My Dell has been able to run games such as Halo and GTA San Andreas for a while. Recently, however, when I begin the games the keyboard acts up. The mouse is fine but every time I press a key and release it immediatel, the game responds as if I held it down for 4-5 seconds. I've reinstalled both games (haven't tested with others but it seems to be common between all games). Also, when I double click the icons now the game loads in a minimized state and I must maximize it to begin the game. Not sure if that is related. I have a brand new Dell M65 with all the bells and whistles so it is unlikely that it is a hardware issue. Please help!

How can you have been running these games "for a while" if the notebook is "brand new"?

Generally speaking, laptops/notebooks aren't good for gaming unless you buy a "gaming notebook". If you look at the specs for your Dell M65, it has "NVIDIA Quadro® FX 350M 512MB Turbocache (256MB dedicated, up to 256MB shared)" graphics. And if you're familiar with the Quadro FX series, they are "the industry-leading workstation graphics solutions for CAD, DCC and visualization applications". They weren't designed with gaming in mind. If you look further into the video specs for your M65, you'll see:

Memory type = DDR2
Memory bus = 64-bit
Graphics memory bandwidth (up to) 5.6GB/sec
Vertex pipes = 3
Shader pipes = 4

Those are hardly good gaming specs.

http://www.dell.com/content/learnmo...

This info has nothing to do with your keyboard problem, but you should be aware that your Dell is NOT a gamer. You're bound to have problems if you try to run games on high settings.

Since this is a "brand new Dell", I'm sure it's loaded with a bunch of useless Dell software. Take the time to houseclean. Remove all the useless programs & make sure to clean up the startup apps by running MSCONFIG:

http://netsquirrel.com/msconfig/