Laptop keyboard and battery problems.

Hi,

I have a Gericom EGO laptop, bought from the UK supermarket aldi about 2-3 years ago. It is currently running a dual boot between windows xp home and the windows vista beta. I've had problems with it before, but for the last year or so, until now, it's been rather well behaved. I've recently started experiencing some more problems with it - some more serious than others - and was hoping someone here could help!

First of all, the battery refused to charge fully. It tends to charge up until about 50-60%, then acts as if it has got to 100% - i.e it stops charging the battery and runs off ac power. I understand this could be normal wear and tear on the battery, as I leave it plugged into the wall a lot of the time. Either way, I could put up with this niggling fault, but then the keyboard broke.

This morning, I turned on my laptop, only to find that the 'w' key does not work. Upon further investigation, just over half the keys on the top row of letters do not work (the affected keys are 'w', 'q', 'e', 'r', 'y', 'u', 'i', and 'o'.) Some of the function keys also seem to be unresponsive. Also, when I press some of the keys, the computer seems to go a bit crazy, opening windows as if it is possessed. It should be noted that I was using windows xp home throughout all of this - I don't use vista much. I have checked my keyboard settings in control panel, and have tried taking the battery out and holding in the power switch (this worked about 1.5 years ago when my mousepad stopped working, so I thought i'd give it a crack) and now I am stumped! I've also taken some of the keys up and checked that nothing is obstructing the microswitches - everything seems fine. When i press the microswitches the keys still do not work, so I was thinking it may be the keyboard which has failed - I found a new one on eBay, would this be a likely solution?

Thanks in advance,

Matt

 

Sorry to learn of your recent laptop woes but "stuff happens ". As to your battery, these things were made to deep cycle - you want to run it all the way down before recharging it and do this a few times. Its never going to behave again as new, but this should help you increase its performance beyond the current 60% charge. Your keyboard is a different matter. If the price is right for a replacement, go for it - laptop keyboards are quite easy to replace. However, your problem could well be more than just the keyboard itself so don't be disappointed if this is not a cure all.

 

Thanks. Yeah, I knew the battery was most likely simple wear and tear, but the keyboard seemed a bit sudden for the problem to be related to usage. Either way, thought I'd just post to see if any of my problems were commonplace among other users and whether anyone could offer any sort of explanation!

Cheers again,

Matt