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Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Sticky keys and now the dreaded “I”

We all know about sticky keys in Windows, right? You press Shift 5 times and the dreaded message window  comes up when you are just about to send a sniper bullet through an enemy’s head. Yeah baby, you are back at the desktop and when you go back, it is all over. OK, this has happened to me many times. Maybe not to you if you don’t play any games. (It’s alright, you don’t HAVE to play games.)

But this is not about THOSE sticky keys. I’m talking about sticky keys, literally. You all know I have a G15 right? (If you don’t, you probably don’t know squat about me) You must be thinking that I take good care of it since that is one luxury item. Heck no! Well, I don’t smash it against stuff. But I am not too careful with it either, especially drink spill. I once spilt apple juice on it, and milk on another day. Of course I was scared that I would burn the keyboard. But it held its guts all this time and recently I think I spilt caramel on it without me knowing about it. All of a sudden, three keys started acting weird. They worked, electrically. But mechanically, there was something wrong. When I press and release the H, J and U keys, they wouldn’t come up quickly. And pressing is hard too. I gave it a couple of days to fix it by its own. Didn’t happen. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I took the keyboard apart.

G15

Damn this keyboard has 18 screws on the back! Anyhow, I took it apart and yes, it was caramel indeed. I took those three keys out, washed them and put back in. Wee…everything worked great after that….except…one.

The letter “I” was acting weird. I couldn’t use left shift with it. It would not register. But right shift worked OK. Funnily, everything else worked correctly. If there was a problem with the contacts, you would expect a few keys to not work properly at the same time, right? Hmm…

Anyways, I couldn’t take it. I took the keyboard apart. Now this is crazy. When I press the rubber contacts inside the keyboard, shift + I would work. But when place the keypad and press shift + I, it would not register. What the heck is wrong? It has to be some kind of short circuit I guess. Will it get fixed automatically? I hope so, because I don’t know what to do. Of course I can adjust to right shift + I, but this shouldn’t happen in a $99 keyboard! Gotta post this on techpowerup and see what they say. Damn it! 

1 comment:

  1. Dont you think this is mechanical rather than electrical? I mean, when you press Lshift + I, the whole board gets a force on the PCB sides.
    Didn't you check which parts of the board bend when that happens?
    When you take it out again, press the rubber pads with the same amount of force you put on the keys.
    This sucks. I had a speaker once that would only give sound when I squeeze the lower part of the casing, or forced the lower part of the pcb a bit. Loose electronic there I guess. Check for loose DIP type components as well!

    And for god's sake! stop eating on that thing!

    ReplyDelete

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