Laptop RIP?

October 20, 2008 4:06 PM

I think I killed my laptop with SpeedFan and a spill.

Yesterday, I spilled some Sprite on my laptop. Within a second or two, my screen went glitchy, with pink bars and distortion everywhere. My sound stuttered and then became a constant buzz. I quickly unplugged the power cord and all peripherals, and powered down the system. Half an hour later, I removed the battery. I put the laptop keyboard-down on a towel after draining Sprite to let it dry. After about 24 hours, I turned it back on without incident.

Once in Windows, I did a quick check and everything seemed to be working fine. The keyboard, trackpad, speakers, headphone jack, screen, wireless, hard drive, ethernet port, power jack, battery, and so on were all working. However, it seemed that my fans were non-operational, so I started up SpeedFan to check into things.

SpeedFan froze within a second, with its last message being "Scanning ISA BUS at $0290." Actually, everything froze; my laptop was completely unresponsive. I shut it down, and then tried turning it back on. As far as I can tell, here's what happens when I press the power button now: the fan runs briefly, the power light goes on, and the hard drive activity light stays on for a second or two then goes off. That's it. The screen never turns on, no beeps from the system, nothing.

I'm assuming that things are now pretty much hopeless. But just in case they're not: any suggestions?

posted by punishinglemur to computers & internet (4 comments total)

I has a user knock a class of pepsi through the grill on his G5. The fans raced off. He told me he thought the computer was doing that to dry things out.

I told him they don't build moisture sensors in them. They just run under the assumption you won't be spilling pop in them.

This said, I powered it down, and with a slightly damp cloth cleaned the motherboard and any components I could detect pop on.

It was a save, but in your case I think I'd start focusing on getting the data off the drive.
posted by cjorgensen at 4:15 PM on October 20, 2008

The problem is the sugar in the sprite starts eating away at components even after dry. It ain't good.
posted by meta_eli at 6:49 PM on October 20, 2008

Argh! Don't use a cloth!! If you dislodge bits of solder and what-have-you then you're screwed!
I use new(ish), little, very soft and clean paintbrushes - with natural bristles (Someone is just about to say Argh! Don't do that!! I'm sure..) but I do it all the time to remove dust, copious amounts of cat hair and some sort of crumb. I use a really light touch and it works just great. To date.. don't jinx me.

Since it is fucked anyway and you've really got nothing to loose... At worst - you can wreck it for parts while you're there. People that don't tighten their screens will always want hinges and all that kinda crap.
(Remove battery!) Grab a screwdriver and head on in!
Take out your HD, disc drive and ram. Inspect and set aside. As long as your HD isn't sticky *I think* it will be okay.

And no more water! Use isopropyl and then only on the sticky bits. Luckily you'll have like a snail trail of destruction to follow. And if you brush (almost!) everything down as you go it'll become real obvious. Make sure your brush is always clean too. It can get real grimey in there without sugar, so... Ugh!

(My SO was telling me a similar tale just the other day. I forget which particular drink was his brand of choice - but the cleaning with isopropyl proved successful I believe. I'll ask him for more detail when he comes in.)
Have you ever cleaned your fan? With any luck it's just packed full of candied dust.
Your screen...? Did it get into the screen, or has it seeped down through the key board? Well.. hmm, you'll know exactly where to look for problems at least.

And blah blah blah. If you're going in, I have lots of tips. (Better than the brush one, I promise!) Which I'm happy to share. If you're feeling brave and interested.. otherwise meh. Unwanted paragraphs and effort :)

Oh! But.. if this happens again, just get your battery out first! Or rip shit out as you flip it -to get your battery out. It'll live if it's not shut down correctly one time. But the battery is really going to cause you all kinds of dramas. (Something to do with Capacitors?)
Hey, what kind of laptop is it?? (*sigh* I do love pulling them apart!) :)
posted by mu~ha~ha~ha~har at 11:09 PM on October 20, 2008

A cloth on the motherboard isn't that terrible, but a brush would be better.

Keyboards are by far the most susceptible part in a laptop, and it might simply be that it took a couple of extra hours for your keyboard to fail - when I had a laptop spill it was like that. I was sometimes able to get the thing working with an external keyboard, but problems were frequent. When I bought and installed a new keyboard, all was fine.

You might have caused a fan to seize, but that shouldn't cause a catastrophic failure (unless you are using an AMD Athlon CPU). Of course you'd need a working fan to get the laptop back to normal function..
posted by Chuckles at 4:23 PM on October 21, 2008