W key on keyboard broken?

[TheBahrbarian]

So I have had my Razer Blackwidow Chroma for several years now. It's a great keyboard and I've had no issues until now. I recently bought Halo Reach since that just came out but noticed when I was walking forward I would randomly stop moving all of the time. I would have to release and press the W key again once or twice to try to get it going again (if I continued holding the W key I wouldn't move for a full 1 or 2 seconds). I thought it might be a bug so didn't think much of it. However, I noticed soon after in RDR2, a game which requires you to hold W to walk/travel at a constant pace, my character would randomly stop when I was walking, just like in Halo. 

 

So finally, I found some online keyboard tester, and sure enough when I hold down "W", it will start repeating the key as normal, but after a couple of seconds it will pause or stop entirely. So basically I am fairly sure that the key switch is broken somehow. It works perfectly fine when typing normally (and I don't have to hold the key down) except for that sometimes when I am typing I've noticed it now might register a single key press as two (so I get a lot of double W's when typing).

 

I honestly don't know much about keyboards, but I really don't want to have to go drop $100 on a new keyboard because the one key I use most often just broke on mine. But this issue is really annoying when playing games and isn't something I think I can live with (I also figured I could re-bind my keys to ESDF instead of WASD but I'd rather not have to). Is there any hope I could repair the switch? Or am I basically out of luck here. Razer warranties their switches for two years and this keyboard is like 4 years old so getting in touch with them won't be of any use.

[emosun]

pop the keyboard open and just swap the switch with one you don't use like the star key on the numb pad or something.

[TheBahrbarian]

1 minute ago, emosun said:

pop the keyboard open and just swap the switch with one you don't use like the star key on the numb pad or something.

I've never done more than taking key caps off. Are the switches just plugged into some kind of socket on the board or is it more complicated to swap them? Just curious what I need to know how to do before I start taking my keyboard apart.

[seon123]

1 minute ago, TheBahrbarian said:

I've never done more than taking key caps off. Are the switches just plugged into some kind of socket on the board or is it more complicated to swap them? Just curious what I need to know how to do before I start taking my keyboard apart.

Just desoldering the switch and soldering on a new one.