So I bought a Dell Latitude E4300 laptop in June of 2009, the first laptop I’ve ever owned. It’s a beautiful machine, but a few months after I got it the keyboard started acting weird. Certain keys wouldn’t work right away after the system booted. They would start to work after a few minutes of endless tapping, as if there was some kind of short in the keyboard assembly. It slowly got worse and worse, to the point where I couldn’t log in any more.
It was still under warranty so I called Dell and figured I’d have to take it some place local or they would send a technician. Much to my surprise, they said I would be sent a new keyboard assembly and I could replace it myself. I have no problem with swapping out hardware components, I was just surprised that doing so has gotten so easy. Back in the day it could be a serious pain in the neck to replace certain parts on a laptop.
They had an online manual for removing the keyboard assembly and installing a new one. It took all of 2 minutes, and the new keyboard works great.
So thank you Dell, for making modular parts that are easy to replace.
