Well tonight I took that old laptop that had developed sticky keys (a Gateway Solo 5150) and took it apart (again) to see if I could get it working again. I disconnected the keyboard and cleaned the connectors which were quite dirty, I’m hopeful this will resolve the issue. The machine seems quite happy now, but I’ll give it a few days before claiming total success.
The last time I had the machine apart and had pulled the keyboard out, I didn’t really manage to get it to fit back in properly. Tonight I found some instructions that explained what I had done wrong.
The trick is documented on the Gateway site too. The keyboard has these very small sliders that lock the bottom half of the keyboard in place (there are 5 in total). The top is held in by some fixed tabs which are pretty obvious if you’ve got the keyboard out as I had.
Now of course, the AspireOne is still a lot more computer than this old clunky laptop, so it is unlikely we’ll use it very much at this point. I still get a kick out of breathing life (and some amount of useful functionality) back into this old laptop.