What Do You Do If You Spill Liquid Onto Your Laptop?

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From one aspect, it's pretty amazing that you can save your ill-fated laptop from liquid death, but from another standpoint, it's common sense we don't usually think of when it happens. The article states to immediate pull out the battery and disconnect AC power as you tilt the laptop to the side with the most liquid to help drain it off of/from the laptop, take it apart, and clean the computer out (to include drying time) before finally assembling it back together to bring it back to life. What gets me is that they recommend you clean the components with tap water and rinse with distilled (or de-ionized) water... which is kind of a hokey concept at first glance (since we're so used to the idea of keeping water AWAY from our computers), but makes sense if you think about it.

Read the comments... and the horror stories. The amount of information about recovering from a disaster like this is valuable in case the situation happens to you.

I just recently restored a Dell Inspiron 1501 that my girlfriend consistently and stubbornly kept near a mug of fresh, hot coffee. Needless to say, there was a lot of spillage and one day, after incident #4, the laptop would suffer from irregular and random power downs. After taking the "piece of crap" Dell from her, I opened it up using Dell's awesome repository of laptop disassembly information and wiped down old coffee stains from the aluminum housing and wherever I could without touching the circuitry (since I actually did this before reading the above article). I cleaned out the dust, put everything back together, powered it up, and - yay - I had a 64-bit system in which to test Microsoft's new Windows 7 OS.

So if you spill something onto your laptop, just keep in mind that it's NOT always a done deal that your laptop is toast. Try salvaging it. What do you have to lose... a laptop?

This post has been edited by rayzoredge: Jan 23 2009, 10:01 PM

Been there done that and yes it is toasted. But it also depends on how much is spilled as well. also if you use a cover over your keypad. they come in very handy for that very reason. Sounds cheap but if you can not find a cover Ciran wrap works great too. I myself use it on my keyboard to help keep out any spilled and dirt dust.

Taking the battery out is always the first thing to do if anything electrical gets wet. the only damage water can cause is a short circuit and the only time it can do that is if there is a power source, so by removing the power source you take away all danger of any ill affects. of course time is of the essence, those first 5 seconds could mean a short circuit straight from battery to CPU = dead computer!

I spilt tea on my laptop, took the battery out and let it dry etc... i never took it apart though, i should have but i let it dry and used it and had a few sticky keys and few dead ones, was a pain as the "=" and "0" key didnt work, being a PHP programmer that hurt.... = became CTRL+V (paste )

It happened to my uncle, he spilled a glass of water in the keypad and it completely die... he had to buy a new one since you don't have any warranty against liquids..

It depends on the liquid. If it's beer, wine, or a fine spirit (Don Julio, Russian Vodka, and the like), I tend to lick up the offending fluid post haste. I find if I tilt the laptop just so the sweet nectar pours neatly down my thirsty gullet, with little spillage on the writing surface. Wouldn't want to have any waste or alcohol abuse, after all.

If it's something trivial like coffee, tea, or water, who cares? Adds character to the laptop, I say. And I didn't really want to drink it anyway as it contained none of the magic elixir my muse so craves. Nowadays, I tend to position my libation at arms length from the keyboard, so as to avert disastrous spillage. An inebriated mind is a terrible thing to waste....

I have another success story to add, this time for my work laptop.

I work off of a Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100. This thing, as old as it is, actually boots up faster than any of my personal machines... and it only boasts a Pentium 4 1.8GHz with 512MB of RAM. The wireless is dead in it, and the power board is infamously unable to utilize the battery as well as keep the CMOS battery in use, resulting in the system never being able to keep a system clock. (It always resets to midnight of 2000.)

But enough about that.

I did a minor spill of water from a bottle of water that I, for once, left haphazardly on the left side of the laptop. A swinging right elbow brought that disaster to life, and so I looked at the spill, looked at the LCD, then quickly unplugged the AC power adapter and removed the battery. I tilted it to the side, drained it, and out of curiosity, plugged it back in to see what would happen.

The computer booted up into Windows, but the LCD was beginning to fritz out, displaying a screen-wide tint of magenta.

I turned it back off, unplugged it, and called it a day at work.

An hour and a half later, I proceeded to disassemble this thing, dried off what I could see, and put it back together. And as of right now, I'm still typing on it as if nothing happened a couple of days ago.

I noticed that this laptop, as old as it is, actually has some plastic shields to cover the main board from any accidental spillage that leaks by the keyboard (which always takes the brunt of the spill). It's nice to know that there is some deterrent against liquid death, which gives me even more confidence that a lost fight with the morning coffee doesn't always end in despair.

Whats really wrong now?
What Do You Do If You Spill Liquid Onto Your Laptop?

Good people of the world, I recently spilled (not intentionally) cider on my 2 months old Packard Bell Easynote ALP Atax A. I disconnected the battery with emmidiate effect and used my sister's hair drier to blow off liquid grom hell, After blewing it , I then hopefuly turned it on, and to my disbelief it turn on and Vista was normally booting. Problem is when I turn the thing today it just stared at me, with no hope of getting powerd up. What next now, Any good idea somewhere on planet Earth?

 

It might be dead.

I started this thread to give a bit of guidance as to how to follow up with a spill on your laptop, in which you were correct in disconnecting the battery, but I don't understand why you introduced heat when heat is the #1 killing factor when it comes to computer hardware. With laptops, the keyboard acts as a shield that covers most of the other components inside the laptop so that when you do spill something onto your laptop that this shield prevents most of the liquid from getting onto these components... but that doesn't mean that it won't be able to get in. That's why it's important that you actually follow up by opening up your laptop, drying ALL of the liquid, and if need be, even wash your components in deionized water and making sure that all components are completely dry before reassembly and booting it up.

I'm not sure what sugared water (your cider) will do to your computer, but I reckon that it's not all that great... Try opening up your laptop and cleaning it up a bit to see if you can resurrect it. What do you have to lose? Your laptop seems dead already.

Hi!

I've got an old Presario laptop, powered by Intel's Pentium 4, with a couple of dead keys on the keyboard. It's the space bar and the 'B' key. It's also got a bad power connector so once it does power up, I shouldn't move it or turn it off :-(
Although I've got my shiny new work laptop and my slightly old personal laptop, I still use it for running the Apache web server and for an occasional game or two.

I play Smokin' Guns, a free open-source CounterStrike alternative for players frustrated with all of the CS bugs, so I had to change the 'Buy' key to 'N' and the 'Jump' key to 'V'.

I can't write anything without the space bar, so unless I go any buy an external keyboard, all I can do with it is use Remote Desktop... I use my old Thinkpad 600E, powered by Intel's Pentium II, as a remote desktop client.

Think I have too many old laptops lying around? I've also got an AST notebook, powered by Intel's 80386SX. It's got a worn out LCD - there are colored lines all over the screen, but if you can hook it up to a VGA display, you can play Xenobots and run Windows 3.1 on it! :-)

I spilled water on my laptop. I wasn't sure what to do so I just dried the keyboard with a towel. It kept on working fine for the next half hour and I decided to turn it off. After being powered off for 15 minutes it turned back on, on its own. I turned it off by removing the battery and it was disconnected from the power source. The next morning about 8 hours later I tried turning it back on and it won't power on. Any ideas on what I should do or what components I might need to replace? Thanks! 

-question by dbx599