Help!

Mykeyboardisbuggered

Sendspaces…

 

Update

It is now fixed, with the help of Google and a community of  people out there who like their keyboards to be really, really clean and who tell you all about it on the internet. There are two ways to clean a laptop keyboard, apparently. The official way is to use a can of compressed air but really, I draw the line at buying a tin of air. The other way is to lever off all the little keys and clean out underneath them, which is not recommended.

So, after some thought – and having had a poke about with a little rubber bulb thing that blew non-compressed air – I naturally had a go at removing the keys. I didn’t go for the space bar straight away – I’m not that reckless – but after 17 years working in IT I had never had cause to use the ‘Alt Gr’ key, so I decided to practise on that first. Then having mastered removing and replacing that I moved onto the ‘B’ key, being near the middle of the space bar. First I removed an impressive amount of fluff, which helped a little bit, but still the space bar was sticking. Then I had a bit more of a rummage about and managed to hoick out a stone.

To give you an idea of the scale, it was like this, but smaller. Although not much. Seriously, who on earth gets gravel in their keyboard? Had it been chocolate biscuit crumbs, it would have been understandable, but not stones. Perhaps it was left there by the ants?