Does this look like a piece of my keyboard??

I'm going to say, No.. When I pop a key off of my keyboard I don't see anything like that, and there's no way for anything to come up from below it... Granted, I'm not using a laptop but the basis of design can't be too much different.

 

The image is very unclear so cant provide a good answer Im afraid.

 

Well, it looks to me like someone's ear wax has a problem!!! :-D (If you were using a digital camera for those pictures, there is a macro setting on most of them, which would make those close-ups better. On Olympus cameras, the button and icon looks like a tulip.)

I can't say I've ever seen anything like that in, under or around any of the laptop keyboards I've dealt with and I've dealt with Thinkpad, Asus and can't remembers.

Keyboards have a small "platform" like area underneath which should stop things getting inside the laptop or things working their way out. I often find junk has got under the keyboard (mine being not very far above ground level most of the time) and yes, those are very likely to be the cause of the sticking you were experiencing. Laptop keyboards have very little room under them compared with desktop keyboards so it only takes very small bits of junk to cause a problem with the keys. A small biscuit crumb or even a largish grain of sand is quite enough, depending on the keyboard.

Rule of thumb is that if the keys aren't going down properly, take a vacuum cleaner to the keyboard area BUT!! make sure the vacuum cleaner is not suctioning too hard because it IS possible to pull up keys and the potential exists to damage a key or lose it up the nozzle. Some laptops can cope with more suction than others.

If the keyboard hasn't been showing any other signs of wear except for the problem of the keys that weren't going down, it's probably not worth getting the new one if you are able to cancel the order, until you have chance to see if there are no more problems.

 

It looks to me to be a piece of the rubbery spring back material that keyboards use today in place of actual springs. There would be a whole sheet of it covering all the keys inside the keyboard and each little bubble is behind a specific key to bounce it back up after its pressed. If a piece broke off and got itself jammed behind a set of keys (like the P and or shift key) it could certainly cause intermittent problems or the need to hammer on certain keys to make them work. If you opened up your keyboard to get to this piece you should have notived the rubber cover, so I assume it somehow came out on its own thru the keys. There could be more pieces inside but if you go in there be very careful, if it falls apart the keyboard will be useless.

If you have ever had a cell phone or remote control apart you would see how the rubber keys work. Its similar for a keyboard in that the rubber pad both bounces back the keys and causes a contact to be made on the circuit board beneath when they're pressed down.

 

I'd have to say the majority of laptops that I've dealt with (and phones) are older ones so that's useful information.

If Laura waits until the new keyboard arrives (since it's coming anyway), will she be able to see the rubber that you're talking about on the new one? Just figure there's no point opening up the keyboard if she doesn't need to, or if it might get worse when she does unless she has the new one there to replace it with straight away.

Laura, were those pieces hard plastic, soft rubbery type stuff or what?

 

Well if they're hard plastic its not what I thought it was. And I missed the part about it being a laptop.