Certain keys on my keyboard stopped working

Question

Ive never spilt anything on my keyboard and they do work some of the time. All the keys that aren't working are on one side of the keyboard, but its not the entire side...

123456789
qwertyuio[]\
asdfghjkl
zxcvbnm,. 

Backspace works, and so does the right hand shift and enter.

This keyboard is integrated into my laptop (The keys just started working again). The laptop is two years old and other questions did suggest that keyboards die like this. However, as you can see they do work every once in a while. Since they're working, here are the ones that stop functioning every once in a while:

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p;'
/

Anyone have any suggestions on how to figure out why they would start and stop working like that? It's always all of these ones I listed all at once.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

My guess is that you have a finicky connection in your keyboard somewhere. Laptop keyboards typically are flexible and very thin. If there is a broken wire in the module, there is plenty of opportunity for the keyboard to flex and break/restore the connection.

The way most keyboards are built is not to have an individual wire path for each key, but use a grid of wires and determine what key is pressed by associating a key with what amounts to an (x,y) coordinate. Since each row and each column share a wire, if there is a break in it somewhere, it can affect multiple keys at once. Depending on how it is built, it could potentially be a problem localized to one area of the keyboard (as you seem to be experiencing).

To confirm that it is a hardware issue, I would plug in an external keyboard and verify that all the keys work on that even if the laptop keys are not. If that is the case, you may need to replace the keyboard. If you can't send it to the manufacturer to be fixed, you should be able to find a replacement keyboard part online. Replacing a laptop keyboard usually isn't a very difficult task, since they typically will just pop out and pop back in, with few screws to remove, if any.