Remember that mini laptop I purchased back in April? Well. It sorta gave up the ghost. Sorta.
I noticed that a few months ago, typing became a tricky affair. Sometimes the keyboard would work as a keyboard should. Sometimes it would type a letter a zillion and one times when I hit the key once. Sometimes it wouldn’t even register a keystroke. But it was intermittent and I shrugged it off as a quirk.
That quirk then ballooned into something entirely different and disruptive. It soon became that I couldn’t use four of my letters or numbers without fear of being locked out by the endless repetition of them. And then…nothing. The keyboard itself just stopped working.
Sure, Windows recognized that there was a keyboard and all the drivers were up to date, and when I ran the Windows troubleshooter, it would simply tell me that the keyboard was an older version and I should try plugging it into a USB 2 slot instead of 3.
When I contacted the company’s chat support, the only suggestion they offered was the reset Windows. Tried that, didn’t work. I Googled a bit and discovered a trick that I thought* solved the problem (which, oddly enough, didn’t involve resetting Windows at all).
*I thought it solved the problem because my keyboard began humming along like the day I’d purchased it. No repeating letters, no nothing. Just keyboard type-y goodness. Until I began installing all the software deleted during the initial Windows reset, and then kaput. Nothing. Na-da. Zilch.
Finally, after all of this rigmarole, I broke down and emailed the address the chat support told me to in order to get it fixed under warranty. (Luckily it didn’t die two months later.) Now, while I’ve already packaged it up–several layers of bubble wrap since I’d already pitched the box–and sent it on its merry way, priority mail and fully insured, I don’t have much confidence in this company. Why?
Well, when I saw the form they sent for me to fill out and return with the netbook, the amount of typographical errors and the sheer childishness of it made me cringe. It’s like they didn’t even run a simple spell-check, not to mention it spoke only about tablets.
Crossing fingers and saying a prayer that I receive my mini laptop back in better condition that I sent it away, or at very least with a working keyboard.
Oh, and as an aside, I went ahead and purchased an actual laptop. It’s huge compared to my mini laptop, but it also has more power, a more well-known name, and I can upgrade it myself when the time comes. I’ll probably write a separate post about it. When I’m not falling asleep on the (backlit) keyboard.