20 USD can get me a new keyboard for desktops and the most expensive laptop keyboard ran 99USD with a low of 15USD.
No tech I know does board repair today since the clients demand warranty and more. So you replace failed boards and keyboards. The repair industry has changed a lot.
I have a circa 3-year-old Samsung 900X3C, bought in the UK. Love it.
About 4 months ago it had a couple of very nasty falls onto concrete, with no apparent damage other than a scraped corner of the aluminium casing.
About a month ago a couple of keys (I and O) started to require extra pressure or repeated tapping to create letters. Then after an accident with few drops of coffee last week the problem appeared to rapidly spread across the whole laptop, some keys produced the wrong output on the screen (e.g. pressing D produced DV, pressing C produced ;C,,W). Now only a few keys work, with the rest totally unresponsive.
A major clue is that the external keyboard on USB works fine.
I took it to a geek friend with tools who unscrewed the back of the machine and found no leakage of coffee from the keyboard into the machine. The keyboard appeared to be insulated from the inside to protect the rest of the machine so he couldn't access the keyboard from the inside.
He did find some slight internal damage between the casing and the inner parts, I assume from the shock of the falls.
He then took all the keys off and found a bit of dried, sugary coffee to clean but nothing that would have prevented the key pressure from making contact.
He says his hunch is that the coffee drops are irrelevant and that the problem is probably a chip that he referred to as KB9010BF. That may have been damaged by shock from the fall, and says there are balls on the surface of that chip that gradually may have lost connectivity in the 4 months since the falls.
He has advised me to take the laptop to a service center where they can test to see if the keyboard itself is functional for £20. Depending on the results, this would either (i) prompt buying a replacement keyboard which on this model isn't cheap or (ii) would support his theory that the chip is the problem.
If (ii) is confirmed then he said a potential solution might be for him to reheat and remold the surface of the KB9010BF chip, to restore the connectivity. He said this is risky and could damage the motherboard, if I understood correctly.
My question is whether they maybe be any other causes or solutions here.
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