Thinkpads Forum

Hi folks,

Long story short, I'm looking for the chances that the keyboard replacement Lenovo is sending me will fix my issues.

About 24 hours ago, my m key started not working. When I would press it, the <> would also be pressed. Slowly throughout the day, more of the keyboard began to act wonky. At one point, I tried to clean it, but the second I did that, the entire right hand side of the keyboard stopped working. I could boot, the computer was fully usable with an external keyboard, but the primary keyboard wasn't working. About an hour later, I shut the computer off, and at that point it wouldn't turn on. Pressing the power button while the computer was plugged in would actually make the orange light on the microphone mute button light up, but that was it.

Lenovo thinks (and I agree) that because the problem started with the M key going wonky and then I tried cleaning it, perhaps the keyboard is just busted (after all, the power button is part of the keyboard). They overnighted me a replacement keyboard.

I'm praying that fixes it. It's a pretty new T510.... about 4 months old.

Any thoughts?

should be the kb.

The keys are always tied together in small chunks to the same circuit, (say, mnbhjkl will be one, and qwerasdfzxcv will be another, etc.)

i had a MS keyboard die once where it started reading the space as the F1 key.

blackomegax wrote:should be the kb.

The keys are always tied together in small chunks to the same circuit, (say, mnbhjkl will be one, and qwerasdfzxcv will be another, etc.)

i had a MS keyboard die once where it started reading the space as the F1 key.

Cool. So is it possible that pressing the m key would instead print <> since they are right next to each other, and is it also possible that the computer may not be turning on anymore simply because of the power button being on the keyboard?

That outcome is highly likely.
Speaking diagnostically though, should the kb not fix it, it could be the ribbon cable plug on the mobo, or software. Booting an ubuntu live-cd would not be a bad idea for further diagnostics.

blackomegax wrote:That outcome is highly likely.
Speaking diagnostically though, should the kb not fix it, it could be the ribbon cable plug on the mobo, or software. Booting an ubuntu live-cd would not be a bad idea for further diagnostics.

Except that:

1) I'm running Ubuntu already
2) Right before the computer wouldn't power on anymore, I was getting a STUCK KEY error right as I turned it on.

Which makes me think it's even more likely to be the keyboard considering I was getting stuck key errors right before it stopped powering on....

Thanks!

-Matt

still keyboard. 99% sure. just ran through a basic chain of diagnostic