[TriLUG] [OT] I killed my laptop ...

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Tue, 28 Mar 2006, Lisa Boyd wrote:

> This morning I spilled Coke on the corner of my laptop (IBM Thinkpad
> T43). Do any of you know/recommend a place to get it repaired? Or is
> it really toast?

there's very little in modern electronics that will have a 
problem with (distilled) water or being dunked in Coke, if 
it's turned off. Everthing is encapsulated in plastic 
coating of some sort or other. Take it apart, noting the 
orientation etc, make sure undoing plugs doesn't leave 
contacts to touch things when firing it up again. Don't 
attempt anything unless you are in a calm state. Take your 
time (you don't want to fry a recoverable machine) - only 
start if you have plenty of time. If you get stuck, go for a 
walk and try it again later. All my THinkpads come apart - I 
don't have the new ones, but presumably they aren't glued or 
snapped together irreversibly. Rinse (dunk affected corner 
of the mobo) everything a few times with distilled (not 
filtered) water. You'll have to get the sugar out of the 
keys etc. Sometimes keys have rubber covers and only have 
one entrance to air etc (where the shaft holding the key 
goes into the contacts) and you may wind up with a key they 
doesn't work (I resoldered in 3 new keys once to handle this 
problem - but you probably won't be able to do it with a 
laptop keyboard). Let it dry out in air. With the low 
humidity of this time of year, it should go soon enough. A 
can of dust-off will get drops out of places you can't reach 
and make it superficially dry to start.

A repair shop will only go through the same steps. They also 
have the experience to know whether something has been fried 
along the way when they start it up again.

Whether the screen went off because of damage or because of 
the high conductivity of the Coke, you won't be able to tell 
till you've washed everything.

good luck

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml 
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!