Laptop question

[Stephanie B]

I have a HP 4510s laptop. The caps lock key has broken off. I’ve looked around to find replacement keys, but it turns out that those devilish bastards at Hewlett-Packard have used three different keyboards for that model, and there is no indication on the outside of the computer which one.

Apparently, one can tell which one from looking at a picture of the missing key. Which I can’t seem to do.

So anyway, this is what the place where the key goes looks like:

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20180620/a9d72b3cd1c44b34272079a0c4883617.jpg

Does anyone know which type of keyboard that is?

(Replacement keys seem to be cheap enough, about $4. I’ll probably order two because I’m likely to break at least one of them. Or I might take it over to the computer shop, ask them to lift off the keyboard, and remove all the cat hair that seems to be underneath.)

[RJ]

Not sure what I’d do.

At work I’ve had to disassemble laptops once or twice. I had spares to work with though. It’s not easy and there are quite a few teeny screws.

Is it possible you could use the model / S/N to find an exploded parts diagram on HPs web site? And thus ID the keyboard?

Chances are a keyboard is the lowest LRU, but perhaps the keys are available separately? I dunno.

Or it’s an excuse to get a new laptop...sorry can’t help further.

We’ve had decent luck with HPs; we issued Dells for a while but had some issues.

[hufnagel]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZpJhpLPPZ4

[Chance]

I'd vote to take the thing by your local repair shop. Even if you do find the right key, the things never seem to want to work correctly after you swap them out - they'll get stuck down, or sticky motion, or something.

[Stephanie B]

I'd vote to take the thing by your local repair shop.
I’ll probably do that. Maybe they can also lift the keyboard up and vacuum out all the cat hair under it.

[revchuck38]

I’ll probably do that. Maybe they can also lift the keyboard up and vacuum out all the cat hair under it.

So, they have the BIG Shop Vac?

[Tabasco]

I like cheap laptops. I only use them for checking email and reading Pistol-forum.com. This one is $250 Toshiba. I spilled water all over it the other day. My keyboard was inop after that, until I used canned air and let it sit overnight. Works fine now. If it shits the bed, I can pull the drive and get another. Unless it's a really nice one, they are disposable. If you can figure out how to get the drive out, get a SATA external USB cable, and get your data off the old drive. It's not pretty,but it works....

[olstyn]

Serious question here: do you ever intentionally use the caps lock key? I can't think of a time when I've actually done it on purpose, but plenty of times when it has happened by accident, often resulting in me grumbling about how I typed my password(s) correctly, and if it wasn't for the damn caps lock, I wouldn't have had a problem. If I had a caps lock key break off or become inoperable on a keyboard, I'd probably just leave it that way. :)

[Jim Watson]

My HP similarly dislodged the backspace key. I can line it up and snap it back in place but it is a temporary fix, it will soon come loose again.
Where can one buy the key for $4?

The unit is 8 years old and I am tempted to replace it. Just can't decide whether to go cheap window machine or splurge for an iMac that will synch with iPhone and iPad.

[Tabasco]

My HP similarly dislodged the backspace key. I can line it up and snap it back in place but it is a temporary fix, it will soon come loose again.
Where can one buy the key for $4?

The unit is 8 years old and I am tempted to replace it. Just can't decide whether to go cheap window machine or splurge for an iMac that will synch with iPhone and iPad.

My last real job was in a Apple shop circa 2010 (everything was Apple except Windows stuff they ran MS Dynamics on). There are some really cool features that are available if you have a Mac. First is Carbon Copy Cloner:

https://bombich.com/

You can make a clone of your internal HD on an external USB or Firewire drive, and boot off it if your internal drive crashes. I used that extensively on my Apple servers to backup the system drive, and that backup is bootable.

If you later decide to replace whatever iMac you get, they have pretty good migration tools that get your data on the new machine without much fuss.

Booting in Firewire mode is really handy as well. When you boot, hold down "<ctrl> T" I think, and a Firewire logo appears on the screen. Your Mac then becomes an external Firewire drive and you can access the data like any other external drive.

Apple makes really good consumer products for the most part, and are tuned into how 'regular' people work. Where they screw the pooch in with their professional stuff. Their server software was awful (circa 2010), and they are lame about OS updates that do not support old hardware. This becomes a problem if you are an audio engineer and they do an update which doesn't support your $20K Pro Tools hardware for example.