Heckroth Industries

Fixing my eeepc 900's keyboard

Today I started up my eeepc 900 and it just didn’t want to work. I managed to work out that the control (CTRL) key seemed to be permanently pressed, even though the key wasn’t stuck down. No matter how much I poked and prodded the key it just didn’t make a difference. So next port of call was removing the keyboard and trying to clean it, as I didn’t want to spend the money on a replacement.

Previous laptop keyboards I have removed have been a real faff, with some requiring me to take the entire laptop apart. With the eeepc 900 though I just had to use a terminal screwdriver to push in 3 springy clips on the side of the keyboard by the screen and then I could lift the keyboard up and then slide it out. There is a connector cable near the touch pad that needs to be unplugged but there is enough cable to easily get at it.

Having removed the keyboard I then attacked it with a can of compressed air. Then I plugged the cable back in and slid the keyboard back into place and pushed it gently down and it just clicked into place again.

It is little things like this that really make be impressed by the eeepc 900 and why I don’t think I will be changing it for a long time to come. It isn’t as fast as a brand new netbook, but then running Debian with a custom build of Enlightenment v17 means that it is still fast enough for what I do with it. The screen isn’t as big as some new ones, but then it does increase it’s portability. It isn’t as nice looking as new ones but as I just throw it in my backpack then rugged is probably better for me than stylish.

Hardware
Jason — 2010-10-06