Rescue a Laptop from a Coca-Cola Death....

A very near and dear friend of mine had an accident. She has her most favorite laptop on the planet, a tiny sub-notebook, that she takes everywhere. She called frantically one night asking if it's bad that she spilled a glass of Coke in her laptop. Being the guy from a long 7 years of Corporate IT, I've dealt with this before, "Oh no its toast!" I said...

"Stop joking, I'm serious!", she said. Knowing me and my twisted sense of humor very well.

"Nope dead, it probably deleted all your emails and files online as well.", I continued.. Thinking in my mind if it was only diet coke or water it probably would not gunk up the keyboard.

" I shook it out and turned it upside-down right away." She replied now ignoring my comments.

Actually that is one of the first and best things to do, but you cant leave it that way and hope, as the keys will pool the pop and kill the key contacts. Next is to get that keyboard out, the battery out, unplug it and head to the store for some distilled water and 91-100% Alcohol (no not the drinking kind) as well as a fresh can of dusting air. You neeed to do this within 30 minutes, get going NOW!!!! Back? did you get some doritos as well? Ok... Let's get started.

Step 1 after the keyboard is removed, most likely the spill was contained to the keyboard, so take it and slowly dump a 1/2 gallon of distilled water through it. (Deionized water would be better, but I cant find where to buy that at $0.75 a gallon) and flood the keyboard and operate the keys, dump in fresh and operate the keys again, rinse out the keyboard, flood, repeat until you have used 1/2 of the gallon. now flood with the isopropyl alcohol and do the above twice. then a final rinse and shake it out. Now you can wait about 3 days to try the keyboard. OR if you are impatient like me, set up some high velocity fans (no hair dryer) and blow lots of air over and through it for a few hours.

If your keyboard was saveable, this will do it. Also this SOMETIMES works for a laptop flooded to the brim with pop as well. simply wash out the whole laptop with the same stuff..

You have nothing to lose except some time and about $4.00 of suppplies.