When I looked over the exterior of my refurbished Dell Latitude E6230 laptop, I noticed  some common touch parts of the wrist rest and touch pad had been covered with stickers. They were very well done on my example. It took me a while to realized they were even there. In use, they were not bothersome.

Initially I thought they were there to cover up signs of wear and tear on this refurbished machine, but I’ve realized there’s an additional and possibly more important reason for the sticker: The plastic material for the wrist rest has degraded.

Usually when plastic degrades it hardens or discolors, but for certain types of plastic, the breakdown results in a sticky surface that is unpleasant to touch. I usually see this in the flexible plastic shroud for old cables and not in rigid installations like a keyboard wrist rest. I assume these machines were originally built with some type of soft touch plastic which degraded in this very unpleasant manner.

I wonder what the production story behind this laptop is. I can think of a few possibilities right away and I’m sure there are more:

1. Dell did not perform long term testing on this material and didn’t know it would degrade this way.
2. Dell performed testing, but the methodology for accelerated aging didn’t trigger this behavior, so it didn’t show up in the tests.
3. Dell was aware of this behavior, believed it would not occur until well after warranty period, and thus not their problem.

The expensive way to solve this problem would be to re-cast the plastic wrist rest in a different material and replace the part. Covering just the important surfaces with stickers is an ingeniously inexpensive workaround. Once the stickers were installed, I wouldn’t have to touch the unpleasant surfaces in normal use. However, there are still some sections exposed around the keyboard, and the sticky material is now a dust magnet.

It is a flaw in this little capable machine, but one I can tolerate thanks to the stickers. It made the laptop cheap to buy refurbished, and I’ll be less reluctant to take the computer apart and embed it in a robot, which is one of the long term plans for this machine.