We have seen a few laptops over the last few months with broken sleep button depressors. The sleep button depressor is a small piece of plastic that is part of the screen bezel. Brock and I have been stumped as to figuring out how these are breaking. They are small, out of the way, and part of the screen bezel. This does not make for an easy part to accidentally break. Because of its size and location on the computer it also doesn’t make for a part to carelessly break.

Today a student worker (who will remain nameless to protect his innocence) figured it out for us. The student came back and said, “I have seen quite a few people sliding file folders in between their laptop screen and keyboard and then closing the lid. Could that be breaking the sleep buttons?” Genius.
So we now know that there is not a design flaw related to this part. We also know that you should never place anything on the keyboad of your laptop and close it (even if it is a piece of paper.)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 23rd, 2007 at 3:14 pm and is filed under hardware, Help Desk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.