Is my laptop completely f**ked?

[ethelina]

Shit shit shit I've just spilt a whole cup of tea over my laptop! It's completely dead at the moment, is it done for?

Unplug it and take the battery out. Dry it out thoroughly, maybe in the airing cupboard.

Did the tea have sugar in it?

I spilled Coke on my work laptop, only a wee bit but it died immediately. Needed sent away but they did get it fixed and I didn't lose everything on it. So, look up the number of your local PC fixit place and take it in!

what nocake said might work but for the love of all that's holy do NOT switch it on or attempt to make it work until it has dried out for at least 24h!

Even if it is electronically knackered, you will be able to get all your data back off the hard drive.

Anything sugary is pretty much guaranteed to kill it, hence the question about sugar in your tea.

In airing cupboard now. No sugar just very hot full cup of tea. Guess I just have to wait a day now.

Is it lying flat or on its end? If it was a full cup of tea, how much actually went into the laptop? Just thinking that if it was a lot, 24h isn't going to be enough to get it all dry.

I'm reading with interest, as I've just taken my laptop to the local shop, because I did the same yesterday.

I find it hard to believe that they don't design for this. It must happen so often. You don't get this problem with the towers.

It's stood on it's end. Pretty much the whole cup went but lots ended up on my lap and the floor so goodness knows how much actually went in. I'm just glad I wasn't holding the baby as well.

Right this is what my local repairer advised: Leave it in a dry warm place on its end for 72 hours, with battery out. Before attempting to start it, check the keyboard. If the keys dont spring back when pressed, do not start it, take it in to be looked at. If the keys do spring back, turn it on using the battery. Do not under any circumstances plug it into the mains at this point. have to see then if anything is corrupted.

Update in 3 days then.

Oh good stuff - well, fingers crossed for you! :)

It is one reason that using a USB keyboard and mouse might come in handy (apart from being [a] full size without multiple functions per key and if 'thumped' by DC is a less costly thing to replace than the laptop's keyboard.

I looked into this for someone who spilt wine in and killed parts of the kbd and the battery - 75 quid for the keyboard, and nearly 20 screws - looked like it would take me a good chunk of an afternoon by the time you followed the disassembly instructions, to get to the keyboard holding screws inside the laptop.

PS Glad your baby wasn't in the path of that tea !

Here we go - cordless use of a laptop for just over a tenner - would allow someone to move the laptop away from the edge of any tables etc if one has youngsters running around.

Thanks NetworkGuy that's a bloody marvellous idea. If said laptop recovers I will investigate.

Ds was safely in his bouncy chair thank goodness, but 5 minutes earlier before I made the tea he was sitting on my knee in the same spot watching Numberjacks on the iPlayer...

At that price it's something to stock up on for 'stocking fillers' (and always handy to have a spare mouse and keyboard - talking someone through the keyboard shortcuts if their mouse dies is not fun, I can tell you and a few apps really need a mouse!)

Mine cost £140 to remove keyboard, strip to motherboard, and remove oxidation from connections round on/off switch. Coffee is banned from same desk as laptop now.

Crikey! First thing I did was plug in fresh USB kbd to see if I could use this laptop. Ended up not going further than checking how much work it would take to get replacement kbd in...

Saw difficulties (time) and cost (for just the kbd) and it made no sense considering how old that laptop was... new one would have more RAM, bigger HD and so on...

YAY HOORAY IT WORKED!!!!

72 hours in the airing cupboard, on its end, with the battery out did the trick and my lovely wonderful laptop is off the sick list and working perfectly.

No more drinks near the computer ever!!!!!

Good to know it has a happy ending...

Well nearly... it died again after half an hour. Guess it's going to be an expensive weekend for me.

oh ethelina - so :( to hear that when it all looked so positive!
I'd take it to the computer shop now - let them see what they can do with it, but at least you know there is hope it can be repaired.

When you say died, was it running on just the battery ?

In the case of the one I looked at, the battery can just about cope for 30 seconds (enough to handle a power dip or to move the mains adaptor from one socket to another [actually I now just make it hibernate so consumption is low and move it fairly quickly to another room if I am in the middle of something rather that have screen on and so on], but I have to run it on the mains all the time (and it is on 24x7). as the battery can get no worse and you can get 'universal' mains adaptors without having to pay the same as the original manufacturer wants, in many cases.

It might cost less (longer term) to buy a new or s/h laptop and read the files off your old laptop hard drive.

There are small cheap adaptors to read 3.5", 2.5" and SATA disk drives for about a fiver on Ebay and the 2.5" hard drive for a laptop gets its power from the adaptor (so no need to pay extra for a power supply unit to let you plug it in).

Then there's a USB cable and you see a 'new' drive as if it was a USB memory stick or a memory card you had just plugged in.

You'd need to reinstall software but would have documents and photos from your old laptop available (and could use the old laptop HD as a backup drive in future).

Yes it was running on the battery, I managed to do a bit of surfing and it just shut down, no warning about low battery and I know it said it was more than half charged when I first switched it back on. So I left it a few hours and tried again, the second time it started and shut down before completing the startup process - 20-30 seconds at most. So I very cautiously tried plugging it in and it wont respond at all.

I think its probably had it, havent spoken to the tech guys again yet but their fixed price for data recovery is £100 so if it can be easily done cheaper then we will, but not really very tech savvy when it comes to opening up the back and knowing what we're looking at.

We've only had it since June so theres not loads on there, mostly just photos which I stupidly hadnt uploaded to online files yet.

I'm currently using the old laptop with its 256kb memory which takes half an hour to start and is cripplingly slow to use but at least it does work.

Im so annoyed with myself...

Thanks for the sympathy Thumb, its more than DH is giving me, its severely curtailed him watching racing online, the iphone doesnt really do it justice...

ethelina - don't be too annoyed just yet - my laptop (which had shitloads of photos etc. on, unbacked up for ages) crashed and burnt big time in April. Took it straight to the techies (it lost part of its start up prog) who said - fix it, no worries. Oops, no can't do that. Data recovery? No worries. Shit, can't do that either. (apparently I had a loose bit cannoning around inside my hard drive like a pinball and every time they tried to do something it was destroying more data :()

So - ended up sending it to Singapore for proper clean-room-open-the-hard-drive-and-copy-it data recovery - cost a fair whack (~£400) but not as much as getting it done in Australia (or the UK for that matter). Data sent back to me on a lovely USB hard drive (320Gb) which is now my back up. Which I haven't yet used and my new laptop is now 2mo (Note to self - DO BACKUP)

Your situation could be worse! Does that help cheer you up a bit?