Took me 3 evenings to fix a sticky laptop key that turned out to be a crumb

Last week my spacebar started sticking on my old ThinkPad. Figured it was just dirt, so I grabbed a can of air and went to town. Nope. Tried prying the keycap off gently, then spent an hour looking up the right way to do it without snapping the clips. Finally got it off and found a single dried piece of gum, probably from a burger I ate at my desk in January. Twenty minutes with a toothpick and some rubbing alcohol and it was fine. Why do I always assume the worst and waste hours before checking the obvious? Has anyone else lost a whole evening to something this dumb?

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ryan65314d ago

...and see, I've got the opposite problem where I'll spend two hours convinced the keyboard is dying, only to find out it was just my cat sleeping on my hand and I was typing with my elbow. That crumb thing though, that's the classic move. I once lost a whole Saturday to a mouse that kept double-clicking, took it apart, cleaned every switch, and it turned out I just had a loose USB port on the hub. The worst part is the pride hit, you know, you feel like a genius for fixing it and then you realize the "fix" was just being patient enough to look at it sideways. My rule now is if it takes more than 20 minutes, I walk away and come back with fresh eyes, because 90% of the time it's something dumb like a crumb or a loose wire. Still, three evenings, man, that's a whole movie marathon you could've watched instead of staring at a keycap.