It happens so many times that we spill coffee, water or other beverages on our keyboards. What happens next depends on how fast you clean up the spilled drinks. If you are really fast and wipe or vacuum the drinks before they make their way into the internal electronics, then you can save your keyboard. But if you waste your time, asking your neighbor what to do, then you might not be able to save the keyboard from permanent damage.
Even if you are able to act quickly and avoid the liquids seeping into the fine electronics parts, your keyboard might still not work because of the mechanical damage caused. There is only one way to find out whether your keyboard has completely survived – through the Keyboard Test Utility.
It is a free software which aims to check every single key and key combinations of the keyboard. It works with both the desktop PC keyboards and the laptop keyboards. It works with both mechanical keyboards and the membrane keyboards. It does not matter whether you connect the keyboard to your computer using USB, PS/2 or Bluetooth – it will work with all kinds of keyboards.
Keyboard Test Utility has many layout interfaces and you can choose the one that best fits your physical keyboard. After this you can start pressing the keys on your keyboard and the Keyboard Test Utility will indicate which keys are being detected by the Windows operating system. It will also show the internal hexadecimal key code that is recognized by the system.
If you press a key on your physical keyboard, then three things can happen. First, the same key glows on the Keyboard Test Utility window – this is perfect and shows that the key is working okay. Second, a different key or key combination is indicated by Keyboard Test Utility – this means key is not sending the correct code perhaps due to damage. And finally the third, if you press a key and nothing is shown in Keyboard Test Utility, then that key has become damaged.
This way we can use Keyboard Test Utility to determine if a keyboard is working okay or it needs to be replaced. While keyboards for desktop PC are very cheap and can be easily replaced, those for laptops are very expensive. In fact, you might have to take your laptop to a repair shop for getting the keyboard replaced because it is build-in the laptop itself.
You can download Keyboard Test Utility from http://drjackool.blogspot.com/2016/12/keyboard-test-utility.html.
Not only are the laptop keyboards very expensive, they are sometimes extremely hard to find for some models. Once I needed about 2 years to find a keyboard for Toshiba Qosmio. My advice- never use cleaning liquids since many of them would damage the inscribed secondary keys which happened to me- most of the keys were totally erased. Better use a cloth moisten with pure water.