Gaming Problem with Portal 2

[artnerd]

I am not very computer savvy, however I do not think I should be having the problem I am having considering other people have beat the game. I have just survived The Fall and as soon as the avatar sits up none of my controls are working to actually navigate or look around. I am on a Dell Studio 17 laptop -- 6 GB RAM, quad core i7 processor, and great NVIDIA graphics card -- and not on a gaming system. The ESC key, however, does work.
I thought for a bit that maybe it was "recovering from the fall" and waited for a while but it remained unresponsive. Even checked out a YouTube video (not spoiling anything for myself) and they immediately got up from the fall.

Is there maybe a hot key I don't know about or something? I would like to beat this really soon!

 

[Joe88]

did you pirate the game?

also make sure things like gamepad are disabled in the controls

 

[Sausage Head]

read a book that describes blogs

 

[artnerd]

Joe, thanks for the help I will try that. No I didn't pirate the game, I hardly know anything about computers or software!