Sticky Laptop Keyboard Saga

Conflicted on whether to give a 2 or 3 star rating, but becuase I'm an unhappy customer a 2 would make more sense, and not a 1, either, because there is an unknown in this story.

I'll leave readers to make up their mind on this review, though.

Ordered a keyboard for my HP Laptop - received it the next day; impressive! However, the keyboard was newish, not new - some keys were so sticky and, basiclly, unpleasant to use or really not usable, at all, while a fair number of other keys were less sticky, but sticky nonetheless. Also, maybe, worth mentioning that the ribbon connector was bent.

My fault completely, I wasn't willing to go through the hassle of the return process, especially because I waited a long time to purchase this keyboard and so I tried to clean the really bad keys (there was evidently some sort of subtle spillage that happened, at some time before delivery to me, with the brownish, stickiness I found beneath some keys I removed), but unfortunately I broke the fragile clips on 2 of the keys so that it doesn't clip securely anymore (those who have cleaned keyboard keys before will know what I'm referring to).

I accepted this as my problem, but still couldn't really use the keyboard, overall, because the stickiness on other keys was just too unpleasant. I attempted to use screen cleaner to soak under those keys, the same screen cleaner I used on my screen and the original keyboard, for years. The other day I noticed that 4 keys are no longer working electrically and that's when I took it up with Laptop Mechanic and tried to negotiate a handling fee and a replacement keyboard.

I got nowhere and I'll quoute the company's last response on e-mail:

"I think it fair to say that you should have sent the keyboard back before damaging it. We don't sell secondhand parts."

Therefore, I think it's fair to say the fact that this keyboard had sticky keys made it second hand to begin with, and it's questionable that the company would have accepted a return even if I raised the issue before attempting to clean the keys, meaning how could I be sure that they wouldn't have stated that they won't be able to confirm if I caused the spillage as they don't sell "secondhand parts", according to them.

PS: The product is no longer available on their website, so I'm wondering if I was the, perhaps, the recipient of their last stock item that was returned by some other customer.