On question 1, I would suggest a new keyboard entirely. Popping keys off of these things can be a bit tricky (actually, popping them off is the easy part. Getting 'em back on - well that's another story altogether), whereas removing the keyboard itself - depending on the design - could be a relatively simple procedure. It depends on how much you value your time, I guess. My suspicion is that once you clean the offending keys, you'll really want to clean all the keys, because sooner or later you'll have to do it anyway. You may be able to find a service manual online to help you with the keyboard removal. On question 2, I'd just find a new battery. An aftermarket battery may be more difficult to find for a machine that enjoys less market share than say, an HP, Dell or Lenovo, but I'd just Google it to see what you come up with. Hope that helps, Frank From: hidden-discuss-bounces at lists.hidden-tech.net [mailto:hidden-discuss-bounces at lists.hidden-tech.net] On Behalf Of DAVID F. FARKAS Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2009 6:04 PM To: Hidden-Tech Tech Subject: [Hidden-tech] Laptop 'Maintenance' Hey hardware mavens... can you help me out with this? QUESTION 1: I have a three year old Averetec 12-inch laptop. (Always mistaken for a MAC because of the size.) The precursor of the NetBooks? Several of the keys on the lower row, initially to the left end over the PCMCIA port and CD-ROM, have gone dead or intermittent. Not a problem for the function keys but became more of a problem when the space bar, M, and N keys started balking. I noticed that holding down the Fn key at the end of the bottom row and hitting the recalcitrant key freed them up. So I've blow compressed air under them as well as I can and they are behaving somewhat better. My question.... yes there is a question... is whether there is a solvent spray that can safely we used on keyboards to clean the contacts under the key? Spray with solvent. Jiggle all the keys. Spray with air. Eh voila... all the keys work again? Yes? No? Maybe so? QUESTION 2: The batteries on this unit only last 1.5 hours, so I have two of them. Both died with a week of each other. I managed to run the battery calibration program in the BIOS on one of them. It charges and drains the batter several times. That one now seems to hold a full charge, although I have not yet tested to see how long it will last. Number 2 is so dead the calibration program fails when I try to start it. Is there any hope for Battery Number 2? I saw a site online that claims to install new cells into dead laptop batteries and the price is less than a new OEM battery... which would have been on the shelf for 3 years. Anyone have any experience with getting a Lithium Ion battery rebuilt? Thanx so much. David _____ LOVE is the Renewable Resource DAVID FRANKLIN FARKAS www.HouseHealing.com <http://www.househealing.com/> www.YourChocolateHeaven.com <http://www.yourchocolateheaven.com/> _____ How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not, for more than sixty years, got enough to eat and escaped being eaten? ~ Logan P. Smith _____ No trees were destroyed by sending this message. However, a significant number of electrons were sorely inconvenienced _____ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.hidden-tech.net/pipermail/hidden-discuss/attachments/20090114/a968fc39/attachment.html