I left a cup of coffee on the table next to my laptop, was in a hurry to drop my daughter off at her mom’s house on time. I came home about 12 hours later to see myself in this situation.
I would love to add pics but attachments aren’t allowed. Are links allowed?
Most of the coffee flowed under the laptop and hardened in the vent on the underside of the laptop. I would like to get some people’s opinions as to how compromised my laptop is.
It was on the entire time I was gone. It was closed. It seems to be fully operable, but I don’t want to risk continuing to run it and ruining a $3000+ laptop.
If this isn’t the place to ask for help, please point me in the right direction.
Thank you.
Can you prove the cat did it?
You’ll find that even an entirely drenched laptop will be fine after drying out. You’d be surprised how resilient systems are.
However, the long term is worse than the short term, depending on how fast you actioned the water damage.
Take it to your local repair shop, have them dismantle it and check for any remaining liquid and clean up where needed. You’ll want them to take note of any excess liquid damage or traces they found.
If its the type of PCBs that absorb liquid it’ll split within half a year, might still work but certainly dont count on it. If not, it’ll be fine.
At this point you should be taking storage backups, either by cloud media onedrive, etc or on external storage usb, ssd, etc
I’m going to go with it’s likely fine based on what you described and where the liquids were. I think you’d have a different story if the laptop was open and it fell directly on the keyboard. I wouldn’t expect pcb to have gotten wet.
I would second this. Managed a computer repair shop for years. If the liquid had hit the top and flowed down over everything that would be bad. From the bottm up very likely that there will be minor issues if any. It’s up to you how handy you are. If it were me I would open it up. It won’t be hard to see how far the liquid has spread inside it at all. Otherwise if you take it somehwere reputable they should be able to charge you just a diagnostic fee to look and tell you more. We used to charge $40 to look and estimate a repair and then that went towards any repair work we did if the client approved the work.
As long as the laptop wasn’t running, you should be fine. It isn’t contact with liquid that kills electronics in the vast majority of cases, it’s liquid+electronics+power=short. In the case of coffee, the danger is in the residue that is left behind after it dries.
The laptop needs to be disassembled fully, and it needs to be cleaned thoroughly. Toothbrush and pure alcohol should be sufficient, that’s likely what any repair shop will end up doing.
It was running for as long as it may have been bathing in coffee. But I think it isn’t as bad as it could be because it was closed. Thank you.
If your comfortable doing small repairs on your own then take it apart and clean any affected areas with 90% IPA or higher using a cotton swab. This will dry within a few seconds and you can reassemble. I’d also take this time to update or create a backup of your files.
black or with sugar or milk/cream?
Never understood why people mix liquid with electronics and a toddler or a mascot or his own stupidity
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lol
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I have spilt a can of monster and a cup of coffee directly on top of my laptop’s keyboard before and it kept working fine for years (I’ve upgraded and now it just sits unused). All it needs is a new keyboard. I reckon it’ll be fine if you just let it dry out.
I’ve got AMD Advantage legion, I don’t recall the warranty they price, but I do know that ASUS gives you accidental for a year when you register. You might look into what Lenovo does.
Lucky it was closed, if it just got wet on the bottom you probably can take it apart and clean it with isopropyl and it will be fine. Just make sure not to miss any spots where coffee ingress.
If you can’t do it, a competent shop should be able to.
Use a coffee mug with lid if you have pets/small children. Like others said, repair shop.
I would open it up and clean it with isopropyl alcohol. You don’t want corrosion to start
That is why I don’t keep drinks next to my laptop. Always have it on a stand at a lower elevation.
If you haven’t already, turn the laptop off, unplug the charger cord and unplug the battery.
Then let it dry, go to a reputable repair shop and hope that at least your storage is not compromised so you can recover your data.
Alright. Sounds good. Thank you.
You can’t just “unplug the battery” though as they are suggesting. Any modern laptop requires you to open the laptop up by removing the bottom panel to gain access to the battery.
A repair shop should at least be able to open it up, confirm there is no damage internally, clean the bottom panel off and reassemble. If they do find damage internally, some shops will have the ability to repair at the component level, and some shops will only offer replacement of the components, which will cost a lot more money. If everything is operational though, you probably won’t need to have anything swapped.
Unscrewing the back and taking out the battery is literally the easiest part of laptop repair
You should drown the cat now! was it a MacBook Pro ?