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I have one keyboard plugged in, but 4 different HID Keyboard Devices are shown. Why?

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Glorfindel
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Jase
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    Open Start, Settings, Devices, Typing . On the Right Side, choose Advanced Keyboard Settings and see if you can remove redundant keyboards. – John Nov 21 '21 at 13:04
  • @John This is what that looks like for me -- https://imgur.com/a/JeYj3O2 -- and I can't see such optionality – Jase Nov 21 '21 at 13:23
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    Also try Start, Settings, Time and Language, Language. There are Keyboard settings there that might help. I have used this before but not entirely successfully. – John Nov 21 '21 at 13:51
  • @John If I right click one of these "HID Keyboard Device" and click "Uninstall Device", will something bad happen? – Jase Nov 21 '21 at 15:40
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    Use care, but it did not hurt a Windows 10 machine I had that had 2 keyboards. Do not try to uninstall the main keyboard though. – John Nov 21 '21 at 18:01
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    @John Which one is the "main keyboard"? They're all labelled the same so I don't know which one is main. And the "Keyboards" drop-down menu itself has no uninstall option, ony the four "HID Keyboard Device" do. – Jase Nov 22 '21 at 05:17
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    I am not sure in this case. When I had superfluous keyboards on a Windows 10 machine they were different. – John Nov 22 '21 at 11:52
  • check to see if you have any bar-code scanners (USB or Bluetooth) or other typing or character input devices installed. – Mr.C Jan 06 '23 at 09:56

3 Answers3

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Why not? ;-)

Keyboards (or other input devices) use multiple HID devices for various reasons. On keyboards, multiple devices are often used to make N-key rollover possible without relying on better HID support.

Keyboards are not the only type of input device that present themselves as keyboards. Mice also often do, especially if capable of keyboard macros.

For example, consider the following:

Device Manager by connection

From top to bottom, it’s a “Das Keyboard” keyboard, a Logitech MX518 mouse and a Logitech G900 mouse. All of them present a keyboard.

Peter Mortensen
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Daniel B
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It's also possible that using a KVM switch of some kind can jack up the number of HID instances for various peripherals.

I have two computers, two monitors, one keyboard, and one mouse, but if you look at the picture you will see that Device Manager seems to think otherwise. It all started when I installed a fancy KVM dual monitor solution.

So if you have anything like that in your signal chain, it might be what is doing it.

It’s a picture of a device manager with HID devices

Peter Mortensen
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fearofmusic
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  • Possibly related: *[Why don't gaming keyboards typically work with KVM switches?](https://superuser.com/questions/1558951/why-dont-gaming-keyboards-typically-work-with-kvm-switches)* – Peter Mortensen Jan 20 '23 at 20:47
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Contrary to fearofmusic's answer, on my PC, I have determined that a new instance gets created when I plug in the keyboard into a USB port that I hadn’t used for the keyboard before. I can verify this as the device that shows that it is plugged in, changes.

Peter Mortensen
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Rohit Gupta
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