Late 2008 Macbook; Some key no working intermittently

[gnomeisland]

My wife's Macbook is intermittently not registering the keystrokes of certain keys--namely the spacebar--but also a couple of alphanumeric ones. She promises nothing was spilled on it and it doesn't seem widespread enough to be caused by turning keyboard navigation accidentally.

When it happens the problems persists as long as several days until it magically goes away. It does seem to happen more often when she takes he Macbook to work or somewhere else with her so she's been keeping it at home all the time now which is annoying limitation for a laptop.

Any ideas? Any one ever have a similar problem? Could it be an internal ribbon cable that's not secured?

 

[free-refil]

It's quite simple to get to the keyboard connector on the motherboard, you'll only have to remove the rear case on the bottom of the laptop. You can simply lift the back of the latch up where the ribbon cable is, then use a pair of tweezers to slide it out of the connector. You can then wipe the ribbon cable with some alcohol to remove any dust or oils that may be present on it. This happens a lot with computers that have been repaired, the repair person may have had dirty/oily fingers when putting it back together and oil may be making a bad connection. What is more than likely, though, is that they keys themself are sticking or dirty. There are a lot of videos on YouTube on how to properly remove the keys individually and clean the area with alcohol and a q-tip.... For disassembly instructions to get to the ribbon cable, check out ifixit.com! Good luck!