Since the a key continued to go out at varying intervals and the keyboard — which wasn’t one of those types that could easily be replaced, let alone replaced, because it was an integral part of the laptop — was behaving in a manner indicative of increasingly more keys failing, I knew that I had to replace the laptop at some point, sooner rather than later. It may have taken the better part of a day to load it once I found one that I liked enough to purchase, but here we are! It actually has slightly better specs than the one that I had before it, although my goal was to replace it with as close to a laptop as the one that I had before it — the one that it would be replacing, in other words. This wasn’t exactly something that I had much of a chance to plan, what with the keys on our previous laptop’s keyboard not exactly choosing the most opportune time to start to go out. The only thing that I’ve noticed that is… not quite as good as our previous laptop is the Wi-fi card, but I’ve begun to do some reading on that, and apparently that can be fixed with a USB dongle if I really want to. I might look into that at a later date, because I would need to figure out what dongle to get.

I’m happy that we have a laptop with a functioning keyboard that doesn’t have one foot “in the grave”!

For some strange reason, over the course of the past few days my a key has alternated between… going out and requiring being hit hard to produce the letter a, or working perfectly (such as when I restart my computer). I am not even remotely sure why this is happening, and I did take the time to clean underneath the a key hoping that this was caused by a bit of errant dust that might have gotten in there. I checked to make sure that the laptop is not overheating in spite of already being placed at an optimal place to ensure temperature regulation, and… sure enough, it’s not. At all. Not even slightly. This perplexes me a whole lot.

In the interim, I’ve been looking for an affordable laptop that we can replace this with because we need a fully functional PC laptop in this house, and if this is showing signs of wear and tear it needs to be replaced sooner rather than later (even if we find out that it’s some strange Lenovo fluke). Hopefully I find one soon.

Not only is the a key a vowel, but it’s also frequently used in gaming (WASD, anyone?) so there’s also that.