I’m having a recent issue with my laptop where some specific keys on the bottom row of the keyboard are not working, such as all letters z-m, ,.?', shift, enter, spacebar, ctrl, fn, win, alt, and for some reason, the up and down keys (the left and right ones work just fine), f8, and delete.
I am very confused as to why only these specific keys are not working, and the issue seems to come out of nowhere, although I had opened up the laptop a bit before so it’s possible I could have damaged the touchpad cable on the mainboard side. However, the touchpad and fingerprint reader work just fine.
I run Ubuntu 22.04 on a batch 2 11th gen laptop. I have tried reseating the touchpad cable, resetting bios (the problem persists even in the bios menu), and an external keyboard works just fine if I connect one. The problem persists on all apps. The keyboard had worked fine for me for the 2 years I’ve had the laptop until just last week. My bios version is 3.17.
I am not too familiar with computers but I will try my best. Thank you in advance for any advice or help,
Did the problem start soon after the last time you opened the laptop?
I’d suggest inspecting your touchpad cable for kinks or other damage. The way keyboard signals are sent on the FWL13 means that a break in one or more wires could cause problems with just specific keys. A kink can cause a wire trace to break in the thin flat cables used.
~edit~
I believe those keys have a couple wires in common. Fn is an outlier tho.
Any other keys? The q key?
What you’re saying is probably right, since the fn key does seem to work and the q key doesn’t work. I took a look and I can see that there’s a barely visible tear in the cable at the bend! I will definitely have to be more careful opening up the laptop in the future.
I thought I might have ruined the connection point, but I did not think about the wire itself. I will look into getting a replacement. Thanks for your quick analysis and help.
I have specific key issues too and was wondering how to find out which wires have which keys in common as I can’t get hold of schematics - I’m not a repair shop.
For me hash key (#) and down arrow both became intermittent after 2 years. For a while both worked with a slight twist of the bottom right side of the frame and now don’t work at all.
I’ve seen a lot of people with similar intermittent/dead key issues, but no one with the exact 2 keys I have.
A bit more info:
13" or 16" system? 13" (batch 9)
Which mainboard? intel 11th gen
Failure occurred after how long? 2 years exactly
Which keys? hash (#) and down arrow
How did fault appear Both keys intermittent for 1 week then stopped working entirely
Which OS? Windows, same issue in bios and live linux
Do you frequently use an external keyboard? No
Do you use a powered USB Hub? If so, which kind? No
Which port do you usually use when charging your laptop? 50/50 Rear right port, rear left port
What have you tried? Checked ribbon cables for bent pins under microscope, cleaned pins and sockets with alcohol, removed keys, cleaned underneath and replaced. No large debris uner keys and no change to issue after cleaning.
Any other info? For a while a slight twist of bottom right laptop frame brought keys back to life but no longer does.
Does this sound like a ribbon cable, keyboard or input cover issue?
Sounds like you’ve done troubleshooting & testing. So I presume no other keys are malfunctioning? Only 2 bad keys wouldn’t fit a wire within the cable or a pin in a connector being bad, since the loss of a line would take out more keys. So I’d suspect something deeper within the keyboard, like traces near the keys, before they connect to a shared line.
Now, while keyboards themselves are available in the marketplace, there are a lot of tiny screws attaching it to the input cover. So it’s very time-consuming. And several people who have tried replacing just the keyboard have stripped screws. I recall one saying they did even despite being careful. So getting a whole input cover really seems worth it.