Hewlett-Packard keyboards & PayPal

HP laptop keyboard: main instructions how to repair it

This short note is only gonna be interesting for a small percentage of the readers, and I apologize to the rest.

The issue is that most types of laptops from Hewlett-Packard suffer from a minor bug: a group of keys often becomes intermittently insensitive. In some cases the problem only occurs when the notebook has been turned on for 10 minutes.

My laptop (ZE 4125), bought at ubid.com, suffered from this problem as well. After some time, I was able to figure out that the problem was caused by the Foxconn connector, and reseating it had fixed the problem. The laptop has been operating perfectly for at least 18 months.

The most typical symptom of the connector problem is that the keys G,H,backspace,apostrophe,F4 do not respond.

Because I found the replacement rather subtle - especially the question which screws should be removed, and so forth - I've created the following web page with some photographs

http://www.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~motl/hp-keyboard/index-classical.html

Dan Arzhanov later converted this page into an entertaining shockwave applet

http://www.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~motl/hp-keyboard/
Jennifer Crook sent me another photograph, and I am also grateful to several other people that offered their help in improving the page. It seems that the page has been useful to many people who have sent their reactions.




Another rather new feature of these web pages is the possibility to

Of course that almost no one does so, but I recently received the first payment - a couple of dollars - which is a lot of fun. Paypal.com works.