beer on laptop, eh?
 

one of my friends, who is older and can legally consume alcohol, accidentally spilled about 1/5 of a can of beer, possibly less, on his gateway laptop accidentally. he immediately flipped the laptop over, popped out the battery and unplugged the charger from the laptop. prior to the battery being popped out there was no change on the laptop display (didnt fade out, etc). after the battery was popped up, my friend whipped the beer off the keyboard with toilet paper. some beer probably went between the keys, but it was mostly just big drops all over the keyboard, it wasnt like a pool of beer. all this was done within 10-15 seconds from the spill. how long do you guys think my friend should let his laptop dry out? ad do you think there would be any major damage done to it? he's knda freaking out :(

I'd really, really, really recommend washing it out with some deionized water.

If any got on the circuit boards, it's a ticking time bomb.

Where's he from, Québec or something? :D Just kidding.

I think it would be a good idea to look around the Web for more advice

my vote for drying time: 1-week

man total alcohol abuse....you never waste beer on a laptop!

Take the keyboard off, rinse it with water and rubbing alcohol, let it dry out, put it back in. Rubbing alcohol is non conductive and it evaporates fast.

#EDIT

Oh wait I just read it was a Gateway. Here is how you fix those, in these following steps.

1) Locate wide open area near a hill side

2) obtain hand gun with several magazines fully loaded (shotgun and rifle are also good alternatives)

3) Proceed to pump every round into the Gateway laptop

4) fixed

I second the rubbing alcohol... it saves my bacon numerous times...

where might my friend obtain deionized water? :o
and ill tell my friend bout the rubbing alcohol thing too
it feels kinda wrong to be pouring more liquid onto a laptop..at least thats what my friend says lol
thanks for the advice guys..does the fact that it was bud light make any difference? :D

My vote goes to rubbing alcohol too. The rubbing alcohol is a mixture of isopropyl alcohol and water usually. That form of alcohol is what is in eyeglass cleaners and screen cleaners because it won't damage plastics. The small amount of water will dissolve any sugar left behind by the beer and mixed with alcohol, the sugar will be carried off. You don't have to flood the keyboard, stick it in a spray bottle and spray it over the KB, dump any that goes down out, and allow to dry. Dries fastest if you make an inverted V of the laptop and blow a fan through it.

Demineralized water is just distilled water. You can get it in any drug store.

Well....so far we've been talking about deionized water, not demineralized water. I don't really know what demineralized water is, probably just water sent through an ordinary activated carbon filter, like the Brita that you attach to your sink. I wouldn't use demineralized water for cleaning electronics.

Distilled water is water that has been deionized using a distillation process. So distilled water is one type of deionized water. And yes, you can use distilled water for cleaning electronics, and it is available at many drug stores, even many grocery stores.

Deionized water is water that has had it's ionic salts removed. Typically when talking about deionized water, you're talking about water that has had ionic salts removed through a multi-stage filter and an ion-exchange column, although as previously mentioned distillation can do it too.

Deionized water (in the broader sense of the term--water without ionic salts) can be used for cleaning electronics, and in fact is used for that purpose when manufacturing said electronics. As far as I know, all manufactured populated circuit boards go through a final cleaning bath of deionized water before they are considered finished.

Trevor

I don't really think there's much difference, trevor. Most minerals that will dissolve in water are dissolved in ionic form, i.e., they are "salts" that enhance the conductivity of water and hence the danger to electronics. Deionization is cheaper than distillation (just a chemical treatment) and far less energy intensive because it doesn't require heat or vacuum. Done well (i.e., better than Brita) it reduces the conductivity of the water to near zero and when the water evaporates it leaves no conductive or hygroscopic residue.

In a small electronics manufacturing facility I ran 25 years ago, we used distilled water because it was readily available in bulk in Peabody, MA, and because demineralization facilities are not cheap.

Agreed about deionization. I'm just not familiar with the term "demineralized water", and it sounds like Brita-class stuff.

Trevor

FWIW-

I was a hardware lackey/techy for 6 years at a company the did sales and warranty service for both consumers and businesses. I was the lead tech there and repaired so many ridiculous things I could write books about it. Not that it would be all that interesting or funny, but regardless I could fill books with the stories.

Now, not to digress, back on topic. I have always used rubbing alcohol cut with water to clean electronics. Afterward I would do a once over with a heat gun we had for a shrink wrap machine. Which is basically a hair dryer. I only used the heat gun ever if I had to really scrub the part out.

One of the most extreme cases I ever did was this lady's ibook. She had a lot going on in her personal life and was in college and told me all about it and was scared because she had spilled pediatric cough syrup all over her keyboard. Since she decided to tell me her life story I felt sorry for her and soaked that thing in water and alcohol (the keyboard that is) and cleaned the heck out of it. Let it dry out for over 24 hours and, it actually worked and took all the nasty cough syrup, and I did not report abuse to Apple, and Apple would have never noticed since I cleaned it up so well. So she got to keep her warranty.

so i got rubbing alcohol into a windex spray bottle, which i thoroughly cleaned before putting the alcohol in it, and opened my laptop and sprayed it on the inside, as well as on my keyboard and all that and I set the laptop open on top of a wardrobe, right under an air conditioning vent. how long do you guys think will take before the alcohol evaporates? it looks pretty dry right now, after about 2-3 hours.

It is probably OK if it's in a breeze. If in doubt, a few minutes from a blow dryer held several feet away.

so after about 20 hours of letting the rubbing alcohol dry off I decided to pop the battery back in and see if it works now. the laptop booted, showed the Gateway logo, then sent me to the password prompt that I have set up on my HD. As soon as I started typing in the password, beeping started going off that usually happens when you press an invalid key in the password field (basically any key thats not a letter or a number, like the arrow keys, function keys, etc). So I decided that my keyboard was probably done for, but luckily I have a wireless USB keyboard laying around so I plugged the usb adapter into the one of the ports on my laptop. However after about 5 seconds, the light on the adapter that tells you its on, went off, so I thought maybe the port was damaged, so I jumped to another port, but the same thing happened. Freaking out I decided to turn off the computer and take out the battery again..just to make sure it wasn't the adapter that was damaged, I just plugged it into my mac, and it has no problem staying on.
now what should I try next? :(

If it beeps like that sounds like a stuck key. Liquid spill damage can do all sorts of weird things depending on what parts it made contact with.

what does that mean for me, as far as what I can do to fix it?

Process of elimination, swap out the keyboard with a known good one, see if it shorts the system out or not.

before I do that, considering the laptop is only about 6 months old and still under warranty, can BestBuy or Gateway do anything about it?

Liquid spill damage is not covered under any warranty. If I were you I would clean it up as best I could and cover up any sign of a liquid spill and play dumb and get it fixed under warranty.

that might work..except I kind of have to leave the country for the summer in 3 or 4 days, and I don't know if they could fix it by then..

so I seem to have gotten my laptop to work and all that, minus the keyboard, which I will probably have to replace in august when I get back from Europe..for now I'm using my Mac's usb keyboard, which seems to work fine
thank you all for all your help :)
hopefully this thread will pop up in google and help some other poor soul lol