laptop keyboard soaked by a soft drink!

[Tim]

On Thu, 2008-08-14 at 08:35 -0400, max wrote:
> i was using a laptop that had beer spilled on it for awhile, the
> keyboard failed intermittently , the touchpad didn't work at all, i
> attached an eternal keyboard and mouse to get around that but it would
> overheat and lockup after a few hours of use. It did however work 
> fairly well until it overheated, by which I mean it randomly did weird
> stuff but it wasn't bad enough to make it completely useless.

Now you know what happens when you get a computer drunk...  ;-)

I've not had to clean computer keyboards, but I have had to clean sugary
drinks, and worse, out of other equipment.  Leave it to students to come
up with inventive ways to ruin equipment.

As in that other cleaning thread, lots of unpolluted alcohol is one way
to attempt to clean crap out of something without damaging the item,
further.  Gentle scrubbing with alcohol and a toothbrush on the surfaces
that you can make content with, and just flushing for the bits that you
can't get into.  But the chances are, though, that spills onto a
keyboard will have gotten past the keyboard, and other parts would need
cleaning too, and with ALL power removed (take out all the batteries,
including the CMOS one).

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.