Water damage?

[ThatGeekGuy]

I have an appointment later today with a client who claims to have spilled water on her keyboard laptop. She said sometimes the keyboard works, sometimes it doesn't now. Also she said there was some error about her AC adapter not being detected (?). I have experience on her model of laptop and replacing the keyboard is a cheap easy thing for me to do. But what else can I do to see if the motherboard is somehow not working properly other than stress testing it? I don't want to leave the customer hanging saying I can't do anything, however I don't want to tell her to replace the motherboard if it isn't necessary either.

Opinions?

thanks!

 

[14049752]

If you plan to do this on-site, don't. With any liquid spill, the system should be taken apart, cleaned and dried, and THEN powered on and tested.

They keyboard almost certainly needs replaced. The motherboard, maybe.
If you do laptop repairs and are capable of replacing the motherboard if it needs it, then it's not "nothing you can do"........it's "You spilled water on your expensive electronic device and damaged one of the most vital parts and it (the part) needs to be replaced."

 

[ThatGeekGuy]

If you plan to do this on-site, don't. With any liquid spill, the system should be taken apart, cleaned and dried, and THEN powered on and tested.

They keyboard almost certainly needs replaced. The motherboard, maybe.
If you do laptop repairs and are capable of replacing the motherboard if it needs it, then it's not "nothing you can do"........it's "You spilled water on your expensive electronic device and damaged one of the most vital parts and it (the part) needs to be replaced."

She's already powered it on more than once. Is it too late?

 

[14049752]

Maybe. There are too many variables with a liquid spill. All you can do is what I said; Take it apart, clean it, then test it. It's very likely that you'll see shorted or damaged components on the board.

 

[Davis Computer Services]

How much liquid did she say she spilled on it?

 

[ThatGeekGuy]

How much liquid did she say she spilled on it?

She didn't mention.

 

[Kenhelms]

hard to tell the extent of damage without replacing the stuff. How long ago did she spill?

good news, if its just water(and no horrible tap water) then it most likely didnt damage too much. but you wont know till you tear her down.

 

[Davis Computer Services]

I would just plan on replacing at least the keyboard and look at the motherboard while you have it on the bench. Clean it off as best you can and put it back together.

 

[ThatGeekGuy]

hard to tell the extent of damage without replacing the stuff. How long ago did she spill?

good news, if its just water(and no horrible tap water) then it most likely didnt damage too much. but you wont know till you tear her down.

I think last week, but I'm not positive. I'll get all the details from her tonight.

 

[sys-eng]

kenhelms is right. Plain water will often do little if any damage. Anything else is a different story.

If someone has a tester for motherboards, please share it with us. I have never heard of a motherboard tester. If everything else will work in another PC, then the problem is probably the MB. That is usually more difficult when working with laptop PC's though.


Good luck and let us know how it turns out.

 

[ThatGeekGuy]

I haven't had any problems with the system, the parts just came in last night for the repair (new keyboard and hard drive). Windows hung once while installing which caused some concern for me, but after that there haven't been any issues. In the interim I had a spare drive attached to the system running some benchmark programs and I didn't encounter any errors.

I'm pretty confident that the board is fine, but I have that fear in the back of my mind that it'll crap out sooner than later and the customer will blame me for it.

The real downer is the hard drive being hosed. There was some corrosion on it, but the drive worked 90% or so. The only files I couldn't recover were some under the \Windows directory. Unfortunately I have to re-install everything which is a pain. I don't know of an easy way to repair the installation. I managed to image the drive with Ghost (ignore errors option turned on) and booted with that, but there's a ton of Windows services that fail to start now. SFC seems to hang, not sure of an easier way to repair the install.

Any ideas?

 

[meanderer]

The long way is of course, reinstall the OS the old fashioned way to see if you get the same problems. If that works, then start migrating the stuff over, then test the replaced drive to see if it is salvagable.