1st thing I would be doing is stripping the whole laptop down and clean every cm with isopropyl alcohol and a tooth brush and maybe leave the keyboard,HDD,DVD and whatever else that you can unplugged and see what happens
good luck
Hi,
A fellow worker tells me she spilt water onto her home laptop keyboard and it will not now work.
She wishes to know should she bother to get it looked at, what could be the problem now, and possible costs to repair.
I guess without opening and looking, this is a difficult question...any thoughts on her best bets. The unit is a few years old I think.
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1st thing I would be doing is stripping the whole laptop down and clean every cm with isopropyl alcohol and a tooth brush and maybe leave the keyboard,HDD,DVD and whatever else that you can unplugged and see what happens
good luck
When you do things right, people won't be sure that you have done anything at all
Depends on how much water it was and whether or not it was running when she spilt water onto it. Most Lappy's have ram under the KB and the battery isn't too far either, my guess is it is screwed. Pull the HDD out and hopefully she can restore the data.
thanks fellas
I repair laptops for a living
Strip it down as quickly as possible and clean everything with metho or isopropyl alcohol as best4less said.And then replace the keyboard as most of the time they will auto type after a spill if you don't.
Our shop would charge you $365.00 to do the job with the new keyboard.
Yeh!Water=Autotype sounds Good! sick of being a keyboard junky anyway?
She tells me it is a Toshiba A40 laptop.
The accident happened over a month ago.
Glass of water spilt on keyboard.
It apparantly still fires up via the on button, but just to an initial dos screen that says "rtc battery is low or cmos checksum is inconsistent. Press F1 key to set time and date."
She says any key you touch has no reply...just a bip if a lot of keys pressed at once.
She says all the lights are on as usual, the drive opens and closes ok, but no responses from keyboard..screen is fine, albeit that it is stuck in it's fire up dos mode.
Does this info help any?
We don't really have a flat rate we have set prices per problem.
Keyboard = $165.00 (Tosh)
Clean Spill from board = $200.00
Quote Fee = $99.00
Fl- invertor = $195.00
Min charge = $99.00
Ect,
We mainly do the Warranty work for Apple and Toshiba.
Alot of people don't get out of warranty machines fixed these days as it is so cheap to buy a new one.
What happens if it still doesnt work after spending $365 on it ?
Quote fee $99 ?
You charge that much just for a quote ?
Min charge $99 ?
Why would you charge a minimum charge when you are already charging $200 to clean the spill ?
Back to this lady's problem..
Do you think there is more possibility that it is soething to do with the motherboard or memory than the battery message it displays?
Can I get her to connect another keyboard to it somehow to rule out a keyboard problem? How do you do that, just connect one in via the usb or serial connector?
I would still strip it down and clean it no matter what and leave the external keyboard disconnected and use a external keyboard
When you do things right, people won't be sure that you have done anything at all
yer try USB k/b
Trust thyself only, and another shall not betray thee.
http://s18.postimage.org/h9xu3rrhx/fb_sevapers.jpg
Damn thats bad luck.
I had a friend who was doing it tough, just got out of rehab and trying to get back on his feet. He brought me his laptop one day and told me the keyboard stopped working.
So I stripped it down and found it to be rather sticky, so I asked him straight up WTF happened to it, "no BS, just tell me so I can fix it..."
- "I uhhh, spilt a beer in it..."
Luckily the laptop survived but the keyboard was stuffed.
It was going to cost $150 to just get hold of a replacement keyboard for it, let alone know whether it would work if I did replace it. The clit was stuffed as well.
The solution was to leave the keyboard and clit unplugged internally and we got a rubber roll-up keyboard from the markets and a mini-mouse.
This got him going again, but he's now got a permanant reminder not to drink beer..... near his laptop..... or at all.
As for your one... If it's giving weird errors about the cmos battery and other stuff i'd be taking the board out and cleaning it with isopropyl and a toothbrush. Hopefully it's salvagable.
The solution might be to buy a 2.5" usb hard drive case and extract all the data off the hard drive so it can be saved onto your friend's new laptop.
Thanks big g
Looks like it's time for her to go shopping....repair costs look to exceed any thoughts, and replacement best options now. Will see what we can do with her drive...rip it all open and just look anyhow, probably no loss, as it don't work anyhow. She rang before, connected another keyboard, but nothin different happened.
Sounds like a plan.
Still, after you get and remove the data from it, shove it on ebay. Someone will buy it, and knowing ebay buyers you'd probably get a couple of hundred for it in its current condition. Laptops seem to fetch silly prices on ebay.
Its unlikely a USB keyboard would work because its not booting to windows and wont be recognised.
Does she have important stuff on the hard drive that isnt backed up ? I would remove the hard drive anyway before selling it as anyone can access information on it if they want to. I got a laptop from the tip a couple of years ago. Got a power cord for it and it booted up fine and had all the previous owners personal information on it.
A good sunny day with a spraygun of metho and dont power the thing up saves lots of things as B4L said.
Any good porn on that drive
A usb keyboard will work because of legacy usb support in the bios.
So will a mouse.
Even a drovers ' dog can fit a Toshiba keyboard in under 2 minutes.
They cost approx $69 from a Toshiba repair centre....including profit..!
In fact there is a high degree of interchangeability across models.
There are zero active components in a Toshiba keyboard.
Soak it in distilled water over night then dry it for a few days.
she''ll be right.....
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