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Question

spilled water on keyboard

May 15, 2019 8:47AM PDT

Hi, i really messed up

I spilled water on my keyboard like 30 mins ago. I quickly grabbed a towel and dried it off. Then, thinking I avoided a crisis, went downstairs to cook some eggs. I'm a really dreamy dude so I kinda forgot about it and thought nothing more would come of it. I was downstairs for like 10 minutes and when I came back my laptop was off. I tried turning it back on once but it didnt work. I picked my laptop up and found out there was even more water that I didnt see when drying it the first time was under the laptop. Dried that off and then I immediatly started googling tutorials and stuff and because of that I removed my battery and put my laptop upside down (nothing really came out). I have now put my laptop on a towel with rice under the laptop and on my keyboard. I put it infront of my window where the pretty hot sun is shining on it.

Do yall think my laptop will make it? I should leave it there for 24-48 hours right? Should I still put the laptop upside down, even though then the sunlight won't reach it anymore or is this fine?

Applied for 2 jobs today and I was working on a training schedule for the summer, so I was being really productive today and I feel totally cheated smh.

Help would be appreciated. Thanks a lot and god bless for reading!!

Angelo

Discussion is locked

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Answer
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May 15, 2019 8:48AM PDT

My old username is even more embarassing then spilling the water. My apologies lol

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I've done Worse
May 18, 2019 10:55AM PDT

Never...ever... eat a pepperoccini (sorry, forgot how to spell it) anywhere near a keyboard. I spilled some of the juice and there was smoke and sparks coming out. But that was on a desktop at work and offered to replace the keyboard but they let it slide and got me a new one. But on a laptop? That's a bit different. I would have suggested both pulling the power cord and the battery and then start drying the thing out. Fans, rice, etc. How pure was the water? Wasn't water with minerals in it? But I think you're beyond that point. I would guess you have two choices, maybe three. You can take it to a repair shop (find someone who has oscilloscopes, meters and does electrical work). Or you can just rack this up to experience and get a new one. The third thing I thought of is if you are still under warranty or have insurance but spilling water usually flushes out (pun intended) getting it fixed under warranty.
If you want to get inside, you might be able to do some testing if you have meters and tools and see what is up. Could just be a FUSE! Or could be the whole power supply. When you tried to start it up, was there any disk noise or fan noise? (This was why I suggested taking it somewhere). Does it have a real HDD or just an eMMC? You might find someone with another PC and see if they can hook the drive to a different system to see if the data is still there. I would try to break it down into individual components if you are going into it. Unplug everything from the power supply before plugging it back into the wall and test the power supply first. Isolate each component or test in another computer.

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Answer
It's a roll of the dice at this point.
May 15, 2019 9:22AM PDT

I missed if the laptop was powered down after the spill but here's a thing. If anyone does spill into a laptop, it MUST BE SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATELY and the battery pulled to avoid some damage. Water isn't that bad except for the keyboard which is cheap to replace on most models. Again, most models are under 99 bucks and a do it yourself job. Better than half the keyboards I replace are 10 minute jobs with under 50 buck keyboards.

But it sounds like the spill happened and the power was left on.

The worst that happens is the motherboard fries. Most laptops that costs as much as the laptop. The only good news is that on most models we can remove the HDD/SSD/M.2 card and get to the user's data.