Asus q301L problem w/ keyboard - many keys are not working.

Bought this laptop from BestBuy (Asus q301L it says on the bottom) in fall of 2013 for my son to take to college. It worked fine for him until this last September. He brought it home over xmas break, and I am finally getting around to trying to fix. Here's all I know:

The SHIFT, TAB, CTRL, 1, 3, 5, 8, 9, -, =, Q, E, P, ], \, Z, C, /, and down-arrow cursor keys do not work at all!
Checked for any problems or devices that wanted to upgrade their drives in the Win8 control panel/device manager, but nothing. Figured I'd rule out any windows settings being the culprit by booting from an Ubuntu (Linux) thumbdrive, and sure enough, those very same keys are also not working under Linux. The keys aren't stuck or anything, they push down and spring back just like the keys that DO work...

I don't see any obvious loose wiring when looking inside, but this laptop is so tightly packed, I've been afraid to dig around too much! The computer works fine with an external usb keyboard, and the (windows) onscreen touch keyboard works fine.

Looks like I need to replace the keyboard completely, right? How involved is that?

 

This type of issue is usually one of two things:

1. Loose data cable. The fix for this is to carefully remove and reseat the cable.
2. Faulty keyboard. The easiest fix for this is to simply replace the keyboard.

If you must replace the keyboard, I think your model would require you replace the entire top assembly (it's all one piece, v.s models that have the keyboard standalone from the chassis) - which means it's pretty involved.

 

I went ahead and ordered a replacement keyboard just after posting my first message on this board -- a friend has offered to assist, so I figured it's worth a shot. I'll post results once I get the new keyboard sometime in mid February.

 

Feel free to follow up with questions, too. Best of luck!