Korg M1 battery replacement and patch re-load

My middle boy Daniel plays keyboard and drums (though not at the same time - that would be clever!) - his keyboard is an inherited Korg M1 - back in the late eighties/early nineties it was the multi-timbrel keyboard of choice for many bands but is now a bit long in the tooth. Still the keyboard is nice with good touch-sensitivity and after-touch. The AI synthesis that it employs is great for piano and organ patches and you strings are pretty lush.
Recently it started flagging up that the internal battery was going flat and of course we ignored it - eventually it lost all it's patches, combination sounds and sequences and without spending half an hour trying to program a better sound it produced a plinky-plonky piano that nobody wanted to hear! So - I scored me a £10 USB-MIDI cable off eBay and set about finding the SysEX files to re-load. Terry Little's Korg site is fantastic - he has a walk-through with photos for replacing the CR2032 button cell and links to the original Korg factory settings. I use BankEditor (which is a MIDI librarian specifically for Korg M1 & K3s) - it even comes with the factory Combi, Programmes and Drum kits.
For some reason MidiOX - my MIDI utility of choice - failed to write anything back to the M1 even though it could extract SysEX dumps. Anyhow - Dan is back is the land of the Hammond B3......!

Fixing laptop keyboards

It's not really widely applicable but I got to the end of a busy weekend with only one computer left to fix! (last weekend was a four-PC weekend - at some point I'm going to have to start charging people!). My sister's laptop is a Compaq EVO150 and the fault was that one of the control keys is sticky - it's unusable because trying to type in Word when every keypress is CTRL-keypress is frustrating (to say the least). Anyhow - a replacement keyboard module is the best part of a hundred quid and a couple of weeks away - not ideal. The keyboard (like most laptop units) is a sealed unit and so flimsy that the thought of taking it apart was out of the question.

KeyTweak came to the rescue. It allows you to re-map scan codes and so isn't as useful as Microsoft's keyboard utility if you're using an unusual keyboard layout (for example). But, if you need to disable a key or make an unused key (like on those stupid multi-media keyboards) do something KeyTweak is the business. I just disables the right-hand control key and all was good. I had to detach the faulty module and use a USB keyboard while doing it, but it works like a charm - and who uses the right-hand control key?