Keyboard shorting badly and Can it be washed at all???
Hi folks, this may sound weird and bad on my part, but at least it may help others even if none of you can help me:
Couple of months ago, about Oct 2006, my four-year-old DVI 800MHz PowerBook's built-in keyboard started to misbehave: the Num Lock key would engage by itself and a few random numbers and chars would pop up each time I pressed a key (any key). Often the whole screen would also shrink and then expand as if the F11 key was pressed a couple of times in a roll. So I would have to stop typing, wait for a few seconds, then disengage the Num Lock key. I might had to cycle it three times, and sometimes hitting the Delete key also helped to stop the hemorrhage. This whole scenario would repeat about every five to ten minutes when I was typing.
Here's the "bad" part. Many years ago, I worked at a large state-of-the-art computing center. To my amazement the whole computer room, as large as a stadium, was exclusively protected by water sprinklers for fire suppression. I asked and was expertly told that Halon, the best chemical suppression at the time, would react with circuitry and render computers useless once exposed; while on the other hand, water was harmless once completely dried.
So remembering this lesson and thinking that a plastic keyboard would hardly qualify as fine and sensitive circuitry, I proceeded to clean the jittery keyboard with 409 cleaning solution and water since I wondered if some slight stain from old food crumbs might had caused a hardened short. Well, days later after the keyboard was completely dry it exhibited two new problems: the number 4 key is completely dead, and several times now it would send key presses to the computer in rapid fire, once resulting in the renaming of a dozen files in the active file folder on my desktop. So I thought the original short was getting worse, and the dead 4 key was just my bad luck. I went to eBay and bought a used but functioning keyboard for $1.25 plus $9 shipping, after much searching and bidding.
The $1.25 keyboard worked upon arrival, but no way in **** I would use it as is. See, it is completely filled with loose hair and fibers under the keys, and the back was dusty too. God knows where this keyboard had been. Well, after 409, water, an alcohol bath, a thorough drying with a hair dryer, and a full swap with my original key caps, the keyboard is now sterile and civilized, but half the keys don’t work any more. Here I am, feeling a bit silly, but nonetheless hoping one of you folks, especially “eww”, would enlighten me on why this keyboard is deathly afraid of water; are the circuitry water soluble? Much appreciated!!!
BTW, I just bought another off eBay, and hope this one is cleaner, a lot cleaner. Thanks again.
PowerBook Ti DVI G4 800MHz Mac OS X (10.4.8)
Couple of months ago, about Oct 2006, my four-year-old DVI 800MHz PowerBook's built-in keyboard started to misbehave: the Num Lock key would engage by itself and a few random numbers and chars would pop up each time I pressed a key (any key). Often the whole screen would also shrink and then expand as if the F11 key was pressed a couple of times in a roll. So I would have to stop typing, wait for a few seconds, then disengage the Num Lock key. I might had to cycle it three times, and sometimes hitting the Delete key also helped to stop the hemorrhage. This whole scenario would repeat about every five to ten minutes when I was typing.
Here's the "bad" part. Many years ago, I worked at a large state-of-the-art computing center. To my amazement the whole computer room, as large as a stadium, was exclusively protected by water sprinklers for fire suppression. I asked and was expertly told that Halon, the best chemical suppression at the time, would react with circuitry and render computers useless once exposed; while on the other hand, water was harmless once completely dried.
So remembering this lesson and thinking that a plastic keyboard would hardly qualify as fine and sensitive circuitry, I proceeded to clean the jittery keyboard with 409 cleaning solution and water since I wondered if some slight stain from old food crumbs might had caused a hardened short. Well, days later after the keyboard was completely dry it exhibited two new problems: the number 4 key is completely dead, and several times now it would send key presses to the computer in rapid fire, once resulting in the renaming of a dozen files in the active file folder on my desktop. So I thought the original short was getting worse, and the dead 4 key was just my bad luck. I went to eBay and bought a used but functioning keyboard for $1.25 plus $9 shipping, after much searching and bidding.
The $1.25 keyboard worked upon arrival, but no way in **** I would use it as is. See, it is completely filled with loose hair and fibers under the keys, and the back was dusty too. God knows where this keyboard had been. Well, after 409, water, an alcohol bath, a thorough drying with a hair dryer, and a full swap with my original key caps, the keyboard is now sterile and civilized, but half the keys don’t work any more. Here I am, feeling a bit silly, but nonetheless hoping one of you folks, especially “eww”, would enlighten me on why this keyboard is deathly afraid of water; are the circuitry water soluble? Much appreciated!!!
BTW, I just bought another off eBay, and hope this one is cleaner, a lot cleaner. Thanks again.
PowerBook Ti DVI G4 800MHz Mac OS X (10.4.8)
