Key starting to die on laptop

[Thomas A. Fine]

The "W" key on my MSI Delta 15 keyboard is no longer consistently generating key strokes.  Sometimes it will mess some hear or there, sometimes it will stop entirely for a while.  It first started hen I was playing Outer ilds.  The laptop does get pretty hot but... I am still using it on my lap, so not THAT hot.  I don't game a ton on this — the keys see way more normal usage typing than they do gaming, so this is a big surprise.

Anyway what should I try first?  Is there any trick that might save the key or at least postpone its demise?  I have to imagine it's the contact under the membrane, because I'm not punishing this thing hard enough to crack anything.  Although I guess it's possible a pin might have come loose.  I've repaired keyboards in the past — desktop keyboards that were water damaged.  I've successfully used a silver pen to "write" damaged traces.  Of course with water damage you typically lose whole rows, columns, or sections of a keyboard.  I don't think that applies here.

 

If there's nothing for it besides a replacement keyboard, are there any options for replacing this with some other better low profile mechanical keyboard?  It's not a very common laptop, and I'm not sure if there exists even remotely standard (or at least common) keyboard dimensions and layouts and such to even allow for that.  (And it also looks like from videos I've seen that the keyboard removal involves FULL disassembly and THEN grinding off a bunch of plastic nubs that were MELTED into place to mount the keyboard?  Sigh)

 

FYI, this MSI Delta 15 has been such a piece of shit.  One of the hinges broke off of the lid after only about 14 months, and apparently this is a super common problem across many of their laptop  models.  I slapped some epoxy on and it's holding but I am SUPER careful about opening and closing it now, alays grabbing the lid right over the hinge mount points.  And the key legends are also earing away just from regular usage.  (Actually the background around them).  The thing is barely more than two years old.  The system I had before this, an HP Probook 4540s, lasted an entire decade and nothing ever went rong.  (Actually it still works, it just finally became too annoyingly slow at too many things.)

 

Or maybe @LinusTech wants me to ship it to him to do a video on repairing it?  I can't find any current LTT videos on laptop keyboard repair.  (On the other hand, it runs Manjaro, and we all know what happens when Linus touches a Linux system.)  Anyway I suspect that such videos don't exist because it's hard to generalize repair methods, or worse, because its often futile.

[OhioYJ]

Honestly I would just replace the keyboard. Most laptops the keyboards aren't horrible to replace and replacements aren't horribly expensive.

 

There are a couple sites that sell individual keys, but that can be half the cost of the keyboard, especially with shipping, and it's not guaranteed to fix your problem. 

[Thomas A. Fine]

28 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

Honestly I would just replace the keyboard. Most laptops the keyboards aren't horrible to replace and replacements aren't horribly expensive.

So I need to buy from some unknown ebay seller in China with less than 500 reviews?

 

I can't find it on any "official" sites, like eu-spareparts.msi.com

 

Besides ebay I've only found two other places to buy it, one is a newegg reseller for 4.5x the price of the ebay keyboards.  The other is — has anybody ever heard of "any-pc-part" dot com?

[Tridefender]

If it's dead it's dead, it's not designed to be maintained by user

[Tridefender]

Just now, Thomas A. Fine said:

So I need to buy from some unknown ebay seller in China with less than 500 reviews?

Generally they are part suppliers themselves, or because lots of people had your issue on a few specific models that shared parts