Daily Archives: September 27, 2007

Powerbook keys…

So, my wife’s Powerbook G4 15″ has been having problems with its “8” key. Sometimes, you’d get one “8” and sometimes two or three…all the other keys worked fine, but I was thinking that I was seeing the beginning of the end, and would need to buy a keyboard. That was especially true tonight, when the numlock key was accidentally on, and it looked like most of the keyboard wasn’t working ;-). I decided that instead of forking out $120 for a new keyboard, I’d see if something was gumming up the “8” key. Well, this was the first time I’d popped the key off a Powerbook, and man, that’s a weird little mechanism under there. See this page for a picture of how the “scissors” works. Sure enough, when I popped off the key cap, there was a bunch of dog hair there — courtesy of our two chocolate labs. I cleaned out the dog hair, and set about putting it back together. I used my fly-tying lamp and magnifier to see how to assemble this…a real chore for 50-year old eyes. Took a minute to figure out how the key cap hooked on, but soon I was back in business. Booted up, and voila! A happy “8”.