Thursday, March 05, 2009

Sluggish Keyboard Misses Strokes

I just finished cleaning up a Presario 2100, an older model notebook suffering from a keyboard problem. While typing, certain letters drop out, leaving words without h's i's and j's (among others). It has been suggested that this is related to the keyboard connection. However, I suspected that this was not the case (and I did not want to open the case ;^). Digging deeper I began to realize that it was actually the battery that was causing the problem. The battery had been dead for years, but somehow it was still interfering with the bus. When the battery was removed, the keyboard functioned perfectly, but when the battery was back in it started stuttering again.

The solution: I removed the terminal plug on the battery, popped it back in without its connector, and the machine is working great!