3431 Ho-hum - Another day, another flea crawls out of the Leopard kitty's fur. On Saturday, I needed to disconnect my external keyboard from my PowerBook for a bit of maintenance, and when I reconnected it, the machine, running Leopard, refused to recognize input from the 'board. The PowerBook's built-in keyboard continued working normally.

I wondered if there might be a problem with the keyboard, which I had partly opened up for cleaning (more on this in a moment), however, I tried a second keyboard and then a third, and no joy with any of them. The only response I got was that with one the "Unknown Keyboard" dialog box appeared asking me to type the character to the right of the Shift key, but it didn't respond when I did that.

I gave up and rebooted the machine, which then responded to the keyboard as if nothing had happened. Not a super biggie, but frustrating and time-consuming. I'm beginning to feel like I've time-transported back to the 90s and System 7.5, what with almost daily restarts of Leopard obligatory due to one glitch or another - most frequently because of Spaces monotonously crapping out, which I wrote about here a couple of episodes ago.

By the way, the reason I disconnected the keyboard on this particular occasion had nothing to do with Leopard, but it's a tale worth relating. The 'board is a Kensington SlimType, which I love dearly - the best freestanding computer keyboard I've ever used - but it gave me a scare when the F and W keys stopped responding properly. A keystroke would register only when the key was pressed more firmly than usual, and the subtle over-center click of the SlimType's scissors keyswitch mechanism was missing, with the malfunctioning keys feeling "numb" and offering higher than normal resistance.

I first attempted to take the keyboard apart to see what was ailing it, but after removing all of the screws I could find on its bottom panel and prying open the plastic clips around the case periphery, the keyboard still stubbornly refused to separate.

I figured that the most likely reason for the key malfunction was debris fouling the scissors keyswitch mechanism - which partially opening the case seemed to verify visually. The marquee feature of the SlimType 'board is its excellent, notebook keyboard type key action - very short low-effort travel and smooth but positive feedback. Because of the short travel it wouldn't take much crud in the wrong place to affect the key action.

This particular 'board has had about three years of intensive production use, and I had never previously made any attempt to clean below the keys, which in any case, as I had now discovered, was not that easy to do by conventional means. Since I couldn't get the keyboard to come apart, at least without apprehended serious risk of breaking something, I decided that the best solution would be to give it a shot of compressed air to hopefully dislodge whatever was messing up the key action.

I started up my air compressor in the garage, which is usually used for automotive related tasks like inflating tires and powering an air-chisel, but a blower nozzle and a 100 PSI blast of air proved the charm for my keyboard. Whatever had been causing trouble got literally blown away, and the keyboard was working perfectly again, at least after I got Leopard to recognize it.

Charles W. Moore

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