Lucky fix for a broken laptop key

Shh, don't tell my boss, but I was letting my 7 month old daughter bang around on the my laptop this evening, not really too worried that she'd break anything. I figured the worst she could do was pop off a key cap, which would be easy to click back in. After all, she had popped off a key on my wife's G4 Laptop the other night, and it went back on easily, or so my wife said. And what do you know, after a few minutes of messing around, sure enough, my daughter popped off the left Shift key on my Sony Vaio laptop. Only it wasn't just the keycap that came off, there were a couple of other pieces too. The three of them together appeared to make some complex and tiny interlocking pieces. A few minutes of fumbling around, and I thought I had made it worse. Each piece had four little nubs that supposedly clicked into sockets within the keyboard assembly somehow, and well, in a feeble attempt to click it back together, I popped one of the nubs on the pieces off. Crap, now it will never go back together. So I re-grouped. Occasionally you can find unsupport docs people have written for the Vaio laptops, I found out how to take out the hard drive before with one, so I thought I'd go searching. 15 minutes of that, and I really began to get worried. Nothing there. Better just put it down for a while. Have some dinner. And watch Survivor. Now back to the problem at hand. I took a closer look at the pieces. They seemed like they should sort of fit together like a fold up chair. With an axes in the middle, the pieces chris-crossing and attaching to both they keycap and keyboard assembly. Yes, that was definitely it. The tricky part was the magical steps to get it all back together. Like a ship in a bottle. One last inspection and I figured it out. A combination of sliding manuvers managed to put the entire key back together. Whew. No more keyboards for my daughter.

(2004-10-07 21:45:38.0) Comments [2] // Permalink