A few months ago I made the mistake of placing a open bottle of coke near my computer, then spilling the content, almost entirely, onto the keyboard. The result was a sticky spacebar and mushy trackpad buttons.

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What makes things worse is my expired warranty. Lenovo support refused to ship me a repalcement even after my offer to pay for it. This isn’t a big issue, though, as ordering a $50 replacement on Amazon would be perfectly fine. The only downside is that the Amazon replacement ships from China, and the already slow delivery time was worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. The package arrived in a whole month and 13 days.

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The replacement process is simple. Removing the back panel reveals 3 screwholes, conveniently labelled with the keyboard logo. Then, undoing those, we are able to remove the keyboard in the front side.

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Then, simply unplugging the ribbon cables for the keyboard as well as the trackpad, the new keyboard can be plugged in and reinstalled into the chassis.

After rebooting the computer, we can test all the keys. They are indeed all working.

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The whole process of keyboard replacement took less than 15 minutes. The user servicability of the ThinkPad line is truly great and applaudable. I hope we can see the same on more devices, consumer ones especially.