Step by step
- Remove the keycap with a wire cap puller.
- Grip the switch top and bottom with the switch puller, squeeze the clips, pull straight up. Wiggle gently if snug; never lever sideways.
- Check the new switch's pins are straight. Align the pins with the socket holes (the larger center post goes in first naturally) and press down firmly on the switch body until it clicks flush.
- Test the key before refitting the cap: tap it with the board plugged in.
If a key stops working afterwards
Ninety percent of the time it is a bent pin. Pull the switch, straighten the pin with tweezers, reinsert. Hot-swap sockets are typically rated for around 100 swap cycles and tend to last beyond that in careful use, so the socket is rarely the problem.
Good habits
Swap over a table (switches launch themselves), keep pulled switches in a bag with their count noted, and do one row at a time if you are comparing switch types so you can feel the difference side by side.
When a swap will not fix the problem
Hot-swap makes switch swapping the reflex fix, but some symptoms point elsewhere. A key that types double is sometimes the switch and sometimes firmware debounce behavior; try one different switch in that socket before replacing a whole batch. An entire dead row or column is almost never switches; that pattern points at the PCB and is support-ticket territory. A key that only works when you press the switch body itself down suggests a socket problem underneath, which no amount of new switches cures. The five-minute diagnostic: move a known-good switch into the suspect socket and the suspect switch into a known-good socket, then see which one the fault follows.
Testing efficiently as you go
Do not swap all 80-plus switches and then discover three dead keys with the caps already back on. The workflow the community converged on: swap a row, plug in, and run your fingers across it with a keyboard tester open on screen; tester websites are easy to find, and most keyboard configuration software includes one. A tester lights up each registered keypress, so a dead key is obvious in seconds. Fix bent pins while the neighboring caps are still off and access is easy. Testing row by row adds maybe five minutes to the whole job and saves the annoying second pass.
Worth doing while the switches are out
An empty board is the cheapest moment for other decisions. If your spacebar or Enter rattles, notice it now: that is a stabilizer job, not a switch job, and on this board stabilizers mean a full case teardown, so decide before you repopulate everything. Owners also use the empty-socket state to blow out desk dust and check no broken pin fragments are sitting in sockets. What you should not do is bend socket contacts to make a loose switch grip tighter; if a socket does not hold a switch with straight pins, that is a hardware fault to raise with support, not a thing to adjust with tweezers.