As my Acer laptop appears to have thrown a keyboard hissy fit, can anyone recommend a repairer in the Zurich/Zug area?

Cheers

PG

There's a nice, middleaged chap with a 'Bueromaschinen' shop across the road from Die Post in Cham. He seems to have done some satisfactory work at a reasonable price for my other half. Sorry I can't be more precise (I'm a tech-brontosaurus).

Papa Goose,

If you can give a description of the symptoms/behaviour, we might be able to provide some pointers on how to fix the problem.

No gurantees, of course.

I am not in Zurich, but still can offer to help via post (shipping) or home visit.

My wife was using the laptop when the battery went flat. After plugging it in and restarting the machine, certain keys have stopped working:
Both shift keys, 1,2 q,w,a,s,z,x. tab key,capslock,esc. The laptop is an Acer Aspire 5920, running Windows Vista Home Premium.
The only way I could get back to desktop was to set the laptop to 'on screen keyboard' at start up as the password has a 1 in it. I've checked regional settings and the format is English (UK), Location is UK, keyboard is UK.

I found an Acer forum, and they said it's quite common, and to follow the following steps:
turn off, remove battery, remove AC.

turn over, remove thermal door.

with battery bay to you, look in the upper right corner of the opening. You should see an unused minicard connector. right behind it is a 2pin, black and red, twisted cable. use some tweezers to gently pull up on the cable. This cable is the CMOS battery cable. once removed, let unit sit for about 3 minutes. plug cable back in and power unit up.

is your keyboard working? if so, update your bios to 3813.

It worked a treat, except the forum was in the US, they are all in bed, and I don't have a clue how to check/adjust the BIOS.

Helps would be appreciated folks.

__________________
How do you know if a Frenchman has been in your garden.... your rubbish is gone, your dog is pregnant.... but at least your cabbages are pest free

playing with the bios (cmos) can be dangerous if it goes poorly. Be cautious if you update it, it may not start at all so make sure your data has been stored OUTSIDE of the machine.

You can flash the BIO with windows utilities fairly reliably, download the latest BIOS for the laptop from here http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers...k/as_5920.html (latest verison is v1.3813 accoreding tot he drop down list) and save it to your desktop.

After this there are a few ways to flash the BIOS reliable via USB key during bootup. Is your windows 32-bit or 64-bit?

Personally i'd just hold your horse and wait for the Acer guys in the U.S> to get out of bed as they probably know the best way of flashing the Acer laptop. It's not complicated, but the firest time ou do anything like this is always tricky and for many a little uncomfortable. Also as PC Advisor stated, backup any necessary data to DVD's or an external hard-drive just in case, though this is largely a precautionary measure as a bad flash won't damage a hard-drive.

Absolutely no way do you need to pay anyone 100 CHF to do it for you though.