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[Embarassing] Coffee Spill on M14X
I'm usually not so clumsy, but managed to spill a good amount of coffee (with milk and agave nectar) on my keyboard yesterday. Turned it off immediately, cleaned it up the best that I could with alcohol wipes, and it's been sitting on the cooling fan with rice and silica packets since it happened. I took off the bottom panel to look inside today and see only slight evidence of the spill (not on anything crucial from what I could see) but I didn't want to pull anything out to have a better look 'cause I'm not too sure what I'm doing. Few questions: should I wait another day or two, then try to power it on? Or should I be safe and have it cleaned professionally? How much might it cost to do so, since I'm assuming that a warranty doesn't cover accidental spills? Would I have Dell clean it for me, or could I take it somewhere like BestBuy or another store that does computer repairs?
TLDR: Spilled coffee on M14X, turn it on when it's dry or call a professional?
89fordprobee
1.2K Posts
1
February 10th, 2013 13:00
well rule of thumb: Water dosent conduct electricity, its the metal particles and minerals in water that do, which still remain after water dries up..
there is warranty for accidental damage but only you would know if your covered and purchased the higher warranty.
looking from underside to see for damage is like looking the desert for water.. sure might find some but not easy task, most of it will be in the rain forest(aka keyboard) so to check if anything made it past you should remove keyboard and loook from there, cause remeber the residue left can conduct power due to the minerals in water...
Just dealt with similar but was juice on daughters toshiba, outcome, ordered new keyboard again :O
morblore
2.4K Posts
0
February 11th, 2013 06:00
Hello orlycarly
I bet it made your heart skip a beat when it happened. Good news is it may be ok but you do need to clean it.
If you have the basic warranty it doesn't cover spills. Buy the accidental warranty for that. When you call explain what happened and see if maybe they will cover this spill. Probably not but it doesn't hurt to ask.
If you want to clean it yourself then read this article. It also has a nice video at the bottom of the page: http://www.wikihow.com/Save-a-Laptop-from-Liquid-Damage
AndrewSi
901 Posts
1
February 11th, 2013 16:00
I had a similiar problem just recently when my son spitl a can of fizzy drink on his M17x R3, my sons heart more than skipped a beat when it happened, the poor kid burst out into tears :(
Luckily we managed to disconnect and turn everything off before anything shorted out
I spent the next 4 hours with cotton balls, cotton buds, microfibre cloths and isopropyl acohol cleaning the internal components.
100% fordprobee is right, the evidence of liquid was much greater underneath the keyboard and palmrest than it looked from the outside
In the end the keyboard was so clogged with sticky sugery drink that I soaked the whole keyboard in a container of 100% acohol for an hour to clean out the sticky bits
I let it dry for 3 days then re-assembled it
That was 2-3 months ago, its still going strong
GOOD LUCK!!!
orlycarly
7 Posts
0
February 11th, 2013 19:00
Thanks for your replies everyone. After some extensive investigating, poking around inside, etc, I cleaned up what bits of coffee I found with alcohol wipes and crossed my fingers as I turned on my computer again. Everything seems to be just fine! There is one odd issue now, which is not really crucial. That issue is that the computer seems to think I have a mouse plugged in when I don't. I had the touch pad set to turn off whenever I plugged in a mouse, so when I first powered on I thought the touch pad had been destroyed. However, as long as I don't set it to turn off when I plug in a mouse, it works just fine. Doesn't bother me either way since I rarely ever accidentally brush the t-pad while typing. Strange, but everything else seems to be just fine! I may still have a professional look at it, just to be sure.
Thanks everyone!