MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Re: Help! Gatinha spilled coffee on her macbook!

> It was likely on at the time but sleeping, but now shows no signs of life. She tried
> right away to power it on and no response.
>
> She put it upside down and drained out the coffee, then hair dried it, and tried to
> turn it on again and still no response.
>
> Anybody know any tricks to revive it?
>
> Up 'til now, my advice to her is quit trying to turn it on, leave it unplugged, and
> give it several days to completely dry out.
>
> Take it apart? Take it in for service? Use it as a paper weight?

My advice is to take it to a service center for advice / repairs.

Laptops can be bitches to pull apart and put together again.

Spilling anything in modern electronics devices, with their traces and contacts so close together, tends to be a very bad thing to do. Even the slightest residue can short contacts, cause very strange / intermittent behaviour, etc.

In addition, there are a lot of components inside that will not like getting wet. The drive mechanisms, the fans, the power supply, etc. If it has a spinning harddrive (rather than solid state), then any liquid leaking in through the vents, etc will destroy the drive.

If you want to have a crack at fixing the laptop yourself, pull it apart, see where the coffee went, see if you can clean the coffee out very gently (some sort of alcohol - e.g. clear metho, and cotton buds are probably best). Go slow, be thorough, and remember where the hell everything goes again, cause they can be sods to reassemble.

If coffee has gone inside the power supply or drive mechanisms, replace them.

Otherwise, who knows, if it wasn't too much coffee, it you got lucky and nothing has shorted or been damaged so far, you might be able to get it working again without replacing too much.

Needless to say: in the future keep all liquids, (and dust, fine powders, etc for that matter), etc away from sensitive electronic devices.

Moose