Gah! Diet Coke in the laptop!

OK, so my 1 year old boy got frisky with a can of coke that my missus had left next to the laptop, she stepped out of the room for a couple of minutes and in the meantime the munchkin spilt diet coke all over the laptop, though she thinks the can was about half full and about maybe third-half went on the laptop keyboard, the rest on the floor etc. Its an ancient Dell Inspiron. After one or two expletives and some panicky shaking to get the worst off I whipped the battery out and then popped it back in and stupidly tried the power switch though not sure whether in my adrenaline fuelled rage if I had inserted the battery correctly or not. Completely dead.

Anyway after a little googling (naturally it turns out coke is one of the worst things to spill) I have stripped the thing down as much as pos (no didn't bother with any earthing mumbo jumbo) so keyboard out, screen off, motherboard & hard drive out, cd drive out, there were drips all over though didn't seem too bad and I have dried them wherever I saw them. The keyboard has a clear film on the rear which evidently had a nice layer of coke sandwiched in behind so (after some more googling) I have washed that in the sink and dried it off. The whole lot is now just standing up to dry. Surprisingly there seems to be a sector of people out there who are comfortable washing the motherboard too? Though I am not that brave (or stupid?).

Now as mentioned its getting on, something like 8 years and I had been planning on replacing it, it is worth nothing as laptop though it has my entire portfolio of private work on there (I do planning and building regulations stuff), I have done backups though not for a few months so only the last 2 or 3 jobs are not backed up but it would be good for it to fire up so that I can just get the latest stuff off it. After that I couldn't care less. What are the chances it will fire up do you think?

What else should I try before re-assembly in say 48 hours.

Thank you chaps as always and yes an expensive mistake: having kids! Err I mean leaving the laptop out!

The disc drive is probably perfectly OK.

Remove this and find out what interface it is and buy a suitable USB caddie that it will fit in. Connect this to another computer and copy off your data.

Any other comments? Gonna all go back together tonight for the big switch on! Or not!

Suck it and see basically.

Be absolutly 100% certain it is dry, as you already tried to turn it on when wet you may already have fubard it.

If you boot it up without the hard drive, it should still go to bios, this will let you know it is working without risking further damage to the HD (which is *extremely* unlikely anyway, but it depends how important the data is and how carefull you want to be).

Leave the hard drive out and boot from a live linux disk.

If nothings wrong then it will boot into a fully functional linux environment without a hard drive being attached so you can test to your hearts content without risk to the data on the hard drive.

Whoo, all fired up and doing a backup of everything as I type (I'm using another laptop to type this btw) the mouse pad doesn't work but I never used that anyway, suspect I didn't get the ribbon in quite right, just relieved to be able to do a backup!

Googling suggest the lappy will likely die at some point as inevitably some liquid will have got on some important bits and will cause some decay.

Anyway thanks for the replies.

You can wash the motherboard. It was washed several times before you got it.

Hi Monkeh, thanks, if/when it fails I shall get my marigolds on!

That would be a little late..

Ahh, hmm, yes I get your gist. Oh well new lappy time then.

/is a technophobe

You can wash and dry any electronic circuit boards. They will work OK for a time (maybe minutes, maybe years) and then die. The water (or coke) gets into the capacitors and they slowly die, usually resulting in severe electronic oscillation and killing the power supply.

maltaron said:

You can wash and dry any electronic circuit boards.

Click to expand...

Correct! Every PCB in your computer was washed several times.

They will work OK for a time (maybe minutes, maybe years) and then die. The water (or coke) gets into the capacitors and they slowly die, usually resulting in severe electronic oscillation and killing the power supply.

Click to expand...

Wrong! As I said, it all gets washed. The capacitors are quite water tight, nothing gets in there. Very few components care, among those which do are switches and relays (however, they make 100% sealed varieties of both, which can be washed.

I'm quite pleased its gone on for all these years anyway tbh, anyway time will tell .....