Chapter 10
Chapter 10: Tripping the Keyboard Fantastic ............................................................
In This Chapter
Peeking under the covers
Maintaining a clean keyboard at your fingertips
Dealing with a dead board
D
espite all of the fantastic advances in technology that have occurred
since the day a human first scribbled a pictogram on the wall of a cave,
for most of us the primary interface between our minds and our computers is
somewhere between two and ten fingers. We issue instructions with graceful
swoops (or fitful hunt-and-pecks) across the face of a keyboard, and the
glides and clicks of a mouse, trackball, stick, or other pointing device.On nearly all desktop computers, the keyboard and pointing device are
independent elements and can be replaced or upgraded by unplugging and
substituting a new device. On a laptop computer, the keyboard and pointing
device are integrated into the box, which complicates matters.There’s one other difference: On a laptop, the keyboard is usually slightly
smaller than the main section of a desktop’s input device, and the action of
the keys — the distance they travel in a downward direction — may be less.
Most laptop keyboards do not include the numeric keyboard and redundant
pointing keys of a full-sized board, although designers have become very cre-
ative at adding multiple functions through the use of additional levels of shift;
you commonly find a Fn or Function shift that converts a laptop’s key to a
special purpose, which is printed on its face in a different color than the stan-
dard assignment.This chapter explores a few possibilities for repair and replacement of a
laptop’s keyboard and mouse and then looks at ways to work around limita-
tions — and failures — with external devices.