Got told to 'just use a rubber band' to fix a stuck keyboard key

My friend Mike who fixes typewriters for fun said I should loop a rubber band under a stuck 'E' key on my laptop instead of buying a new keyboard. Tried it last Tuesday and the key popped right back up, but then the band snapped inside and jammed two more keys. Ended up spending 20 minutes with tweezers digging out rubber bits - has anyone else gotten weird hardware advice from a hobbyist that backfired?

2 comments

2 Comments

reese55011d ago

Well see thats the thing, sometimes those old timey fixes work if you know what youre doing. I had a 1998 Dell that would overheat and shut down if I ran it more than an hour, and a guy at the repair shop told me to prop it up on four bottle caps to let air flow underneath. Sounded ridiculous but that thing ran another two years before I finally replaced it. The rubber band trick obviously went wrong for you but thats more because laptop keyboards these days are built like paper mache. Mike probably thought you had a mechanical keyboard where you can actually get at the switches. The real issue is people sharing advice without checking what youre working with first. Not that shortcuts are always bad, you just have to match the fix to the machine.

carter.jennifer11d ago

Hasn't this happened to everyone at some point where you take a shortcut that someone swore would work and it just makes everything worse? Feels like the whole world is trying to hack things that really just need a proper fix, not a life hack from 2012 YouTube.