June 5th, 2007 : PowerBook Keyboard
Sometimes the best fixes are the ones that go crunch. My PowerBook half-heartedly fell from my knee to my foot this evening, and soon after I found that my space bar didn’t always want to give me a space. I had lines of text which kindalookedlikethis. At first I began to worry, but after a few Google Searches, I found this advice on Adam Kalsey’s blog:
The space bar on my PowerBook has been sticking as long as I can remember — perhaps it came like that, I don’t recall. The key only travelled about halfway down; sometimes it added a space, sometimes it didn’t. I tried all the various recomendations I’d found online: vaccuuming the keyboard, shaking it upside down, and a few other odd ones. Nothing worked.
Today I got annoyed with it enough that I just pushed down really hard. I heard a “crack” and a bunch of spaces appeared on the screen. The spacebar now works just fine. Whatever was causing it to stick has been broken, pulverized, pushed aside, or otherwise rendered harmless.
After following the advice, my keyboard is working smoothly again!
You’ll probably find yourself needing to repeat this “fix” every so often. Turns out there’s a plastic layer taped over the switches under the keys and the tape comes up, causing the plastic to get in the way and keep the keys from traveling all the way down. Pushing really hard either moves the plastic or re-sticks the tape.
Thanks for the tip, and nice blog by the way.