Mike’s Technology Blog

My Compaq Presario V2000 Laptop is acting up and I need help!  It’s keyboard is no longer fully functioning and I’m having a hard time using it.  The non-functioning keys are: Insert, Delete, Home, Page Up, Page Down, End, Left Arrow, and Right Arrow.  I use these keys - especially delete, home, page up and down, end, and the arrows keys a lot and it’s pretty tough typing without them functioning.  Below is a photo of said keys:

As you can see, all of them are on the right side of the keyboard so my guess is that a single problem affected all of them.  I’d be glad to know how to fix them so if someone who knows the fix happens to stumble across this page, kindly leave me a comment below.  I already know how to disassemble the laptop so that wouldn’t be a problem.  Anyone who happens to come across the same problem - please also leave a message and tell me what happened.

Of course I can take it to the service center but that means perhaps a week of no work for me and that’s pretty tough… not to mention the amount that they would charge me to fix it.  I’d prefer fixing it myself.   My worry though is that the motherboard might be damaged - in which case I guess I just have to take it to a service center.  I hope that it just needs a good cleaning.

Wish me luck!

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Update (08/12/2008): After almost one year of not doing anything on this laptop besides cleaning it, I finally decided to buy a replacement keyboard on eBay (seller was techtoys888) which got delivered to me today (August (our local post office received it last August 7 days after). The item was shipped to me last July 30 so that’s 13 days of waiting which to me is acceptable. Cost was $18.48 for the item + $2.50 for shipping insurance for a mere total of $20.98. That’s way cheaper than getting it fixed in the service center.

I then downloaded the maintenance and service guide PDF file from HP for my Compaq Presario V2000 laptop and replaced the keyboard. Replacing it was easy and straightforward. All you need are some screwdrivers and the ability to follow instructions. It’s now working flawlessly with all the keys working as they should be.

Any Linux user with an ATI Radeon graphics chipset knows that making the graphics card work to its full power is not an easy task to do.  While AMD does provide closed source Linux drivers for ATI Radeon graphics cards, it’s quite of a hit and miss for the Linux community.  I for one can’t use my Compaq Presario V2000’s graphics capability to the fullest so this is good news for me.

Two days ago (old news ei?) I read from Linux.com that it’s official.  It didn’t excite me at first until I came to the line that says the driver will be opensourced by September 10.  Cool I thought!  Faster development, faster improvement, and better graphics acceleration for my laptop.   I c an now finally get Beryl run smoothly.

Read more about this at http://www.linux.com/feature/119049

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