<p>Okay, so stupidity rules and working from WiFi coffee shops led to 16 oz of hot tea hitting my laptop keyboard in slow motion.</p>
<p>Obviously I turned it off and I tipped it up to allow drainage, I know to leave it off 24 hours to let all parts dry.</p>
<p>What else can I or should I do? Besides check my extended warranty rules!</p>
<p>Should I some how “rinse” the tea w/water to get rid of residual stickiness?</p>
<p>i recall a lifetime ago working in a restaurant where we would take out the circuit boards of the fancy cash registers to wash the grease off them, but how/what should I do to try to save my laptop :(</p>
<p>Thanks for any help…I’ll checking later from some one else’s computer, if any oen will trust me to touch theirs!</p>
<p>can you take out the keyboard to allow more air to get in?</p>
<p>(I have spilled many things on my laptop-)</p>
<p>I know that electronics are generally very hardy- also depending on design of laptop, the most that may happen is that you have to replace the keyboard.</p>
<p>I am smiling, though I am sure you don’t want me to be smiling about now! Sorry but as soon as I saw the subject heading, I called upstairs to my D who is not only unpacking tons of stuff from college but cleaning out cartons and cartons of old stuff from her bedroom (would I ever see this day finally???). I told her of your subject heading because…</p>
<p>Two months ago, at college, a book fell off her bookshelf above her desk and knocked over a large sized hot tea all over her keyboard and immediately shut down the laptop and it would not work. This was after midnight as she was putting the finishing touches on a paper due the next day! </p>
<p>You are right to keep it turned off and unplug all connections and tip it for drainage and let it dry out. However, that likely won’t be enough, sorry to say, or wasn’t in her case anyway, not with that quantity of tea. </p>
<p>She took hers the next day to the Apple Store in Manhattan. They said they don’t know if they could ever fix it to work but would try to the tune of $1200 and one week’s time. We have computer insurance but they told her it would not be able to apply (this was NOT true we learned). She opted to not leave it with them due to cost and the time involved. She did get them to document that her laptop would not work so she had some proof to show the professor that afternoon as to why her paper was printed out to hand in (the modern version of “my dog ate my homework”!). All worked out with that, by the way. </p>
<p>We talked to our local Mac repair person who felt certain he could fix it. She Fed Exed it to him here overnight. Right away, he was able to get the data off her computer (and sent her her paper in an email) and within two days, he fixed it. It cost $500. Unfortunately our deductible is also $500 so it was still costly but at least not the $1200 Apple quoted. I forget exactly what he did to it and replaced but I sure it was cleaned out inside. </p>
<p>Also, if you research this online, I recall several websites that had some helpful strategies in such a situation. But I would get it to a repair person, and at the least, get the data off the computer right away, as our guy did. </p>
<p>Portable drives are so cheap nowdays and although I realize- this is a case of Do as I say! not as I do!</p>
<p>( I do have a portable drive- but I haven’t backed up anything for several months)</p>
<p>It will give you motivation to back up as soon as you dry it out.</p>
<p>Am I understanding you right and the whole teacup went * into* your laptop?</p>
<p>I have just had splashes for the most part- and those were fairly uneventful- I have heard of people dropping cell phones in toilets and drying them out completely before they were turned back on and they worked fine.
But computers are a little more complicated and fragile.</p>
<p>( I assume you also took out the battery?)</p>
<p>It often happens at the most inopportune moment too :(</p>
<p>We do have external back up drives. For my child who had this happen with a container of tea…we had backed up all her data three months prior but not since then. For my other daughter, we bought her her own back up external hard drive as she has had computers die twice and has had to get expensive repairs and retrievals done to her laptops at school. In fact, we were dealing with that about a week apart from other D’s laptop spill. Fun times. Expensive times.</p>
<p>If the tea had sugar and/or milk in it you might be doomed.</p>
<p>Fly, do not walk, to a PC repair shop and have them strip it and dry it. The sooner the better. This should take less than an hour. If it works when it’s dry, congratulations. If not, they might have to replace the mother board, keyboard, or whatever else makes sense. By the way, soozievt was hosed with a $1,200 quote without diagnostics. That’s probably the price for labor and a new motherboard. For that much money, I’d order a new computer and get a shop (I would do it myself, but most people don’t have the resources) to move the data over from the old hard disk, which is probably unaffected by the tea.</p>
<p>A cow orker dumped a cup of black coffee into my Dell D610 during a meeting. I walked it straight to our PC support folks who field stripped the machine down to its component parts, patted it dry with paper towels and reassembled it. It worked great, but he did say that it usually didn’t with sugar or cream.</p>
<p>Totally off subject, but DH had Orange County Choppers on, the show on TLC. They were buidling a custom bike for one of the big computer companies–HP maybe? Dell? Dad and the two sons were at company headquarters. They were acting silly at times, playing around in a rather large campus on Segways, and racing down hallways. At one point dad was in a room with laptops and company executives, and he got angry and lost --threw a laptop down and jumped on it and pieces went flying. It truely looked like a lost cause. He caught the executives rather off guard. Their immediate response was what the…? One company rep nonchalantly opened it up and turned it on, and the thing powered up. Some of the “shirts” in the room were nonplussed, some relieved. It looked unscripted. </p>
<p>Not your problem, but get it to someone who can safely open it up and help it to dry out.</p>
<p>nope I am not Dr Laura, but I wish I had her staff to fix my laptop. I followed the drain it & wait directions I found online, by the time I checked this site again and got the advice to take it right to a tech it was after business hours, so I have talked to a tech and he says wait 48 hours if I can. The fact that there was no sugar and the milk was non-fat are both good, but who knows about the nano-capacity of tea residue to fry electronics.</p>
<p>The tech I spoke with said give it a try tomorrow, so I have opened it up…saw no tea inside the innards and am hopeful tomorrow will bring good news. Otherwise, I will be making an insurance claim! I added computer coverage to my homeowners when one of my college kids had her laptop stolen and we had to start from scratch. Apparently my computer coverage offers full replacement for a comparably priced machine now- so a new $1500 machine and includes the cost to move the data from teh hard drive. It is a major relieft to know it won’t cost me $2000 out of pocket for replacing a 1 year old machine, if worst comes to worst!</p>
<p>I spilt tea in my PC laptop recently, but I was impatient and didn’t wait 24 hours to turn it on. It made funny noises and wouldn’t boot. I stopped by the store on my way home and bought a can of air to dry it - the techies there told me that I probably fried it and would have to replace it.</p>
<p>My husband took it apart, dried it off and started debugging it. Determined that the disk was fine, since it worked in another computer. However, it looked like the memory was ruined, since it’s where the tea settled. I bought a new memory card for $75 and replaced it and it works just like new. Guess I was lucky - Those guys at Staples sure wanted to sell me a new machine.</p>