[Dunhamzzz]

About a year ago, my housemate decided it would be a good idea to drop my Dell Mini 9 down some stairs. Not so good as you can imagine.
I soon arranged with Dell to have the broken bits fixed and I had my Mini 9 back with brand new LCD and Motherboard.

However all was not perfect, I was having the most minor-ist of problems with the keyboard, specifically the [ ] # and \ (which you can see on the latter of the two pictures in this post. Nothing major, but a bit annoying as the square bracket keys are used quite often in PHP. I had obviously searched for this problem on the forum but no one had had this very specific problem.

Today, it finally got to me and I rang Dell support. After arguments about OS's (they did not approve of me using Windows 7) I was able to convince the agent that something was wrong with the hardware setup. I even suggested that as I had the Mobo replaced, was it possible I had received a US mobo that didn't like the UK keyboard? (I was actually kinda right, read on) He said this was impossible and that I would have to send my Mini 9 in to have it looked at. So all the arrangements to have my Mini collected have been made.

This was obviously a major inconvenience, so I turned back to our loving community to see if in the last few months this problem had arose. Turns out it had, and I was right about the motherboard.

Thanks to forum member glueball and this thread I learnt that when the motherboard has been replaced, there is a certain start up procedure to setup the keyboard matrix with the motherboard. This obviously hadn't been done for my Mini.

Incase anyone else is having problems with certain keyboard keys:

Setting keyboard matrix
1. Turn off your computer
2. If your computer is connected to the ac adapter, disconnect the ac adapter from the computer
3. Press and hold the following key combination for the desired keyboard matrix :
_ United States : <Fn><S>
_ United Kingdom : <Fn><K>
_ Japan : <Fn><J>
_ Korea : <Fn><E>
4. Connect the ac adapter to the computer then plug it into a wall outlet or surge protector
5. Release the key combination

How glueball came about knowing that I don't know, but a big thanks goes out to that guy!

I now have to get back on to Dell to cancel the courier!

[holmes4]

This sequence is also discussed in the thread about the US-International keyboard.

[itprogrammer]

I have come to realize that the first level of Dell Support is a call center (possibly not even just Dell support) that reads from a script. I had called once and already went through several more "advanced" steps to fix my problem. After getting on the phone with the tech they had me try a few things that had nothing to even do with my problem. After about 20 minutes of humoring the tech, they finally admitted they didn't know what else to do and took my info for a second level tech to call. The second level tech was much much better. I still eventually had to send it in for repair, but the second level tech was atleast knowledgable.

I also had a few problems with a keyboard (bad keys registering, not the motherboard) and the tech had my run through the diagnostics build right into the mini 9. To get to this do the following:

Press and hold the <Fn> key, and then press the power button to power the system on.
Release both buttons.
The PSA diagnostics sequence begins.
The PSA diagnostics completes.
The Dell GUI Diagnostics sequence begins.
Click on Custom Test.
Click on Keyboard and click on Run test

There are many many other diagnostics that can be run from here. It is a pretty neat little utility.