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
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