Things have been delayed around here, and elsewhere, because last Wednesday I spilt a beer onto my MacBook Pro, sending it comatose. That’s one damn expensive beer. And it’ll take me a while to catch up.
Now a splash of beer or, presumably, any other liquid should you be mad enough to drink them, won’t necessarily kill a computer or smartphone. The emergency procedure is straightforward.
Turn it off. Pull the battery, if you can. Get rid of as much liquid as fast as you can by mopping it up. Then get rid of any lingering moisture: dismantle the device as much as it can be, and put it in a sealed container packed with silica gel or uncooked rice for three days or more.
If the liquid is potentially damaging to the device — a certain popular cola drink, say, which is acidic and will damage some components — you can rinse it with distilled water or isopropyl alcohol too. Choose the one that’ll dissolve the threat.
With a laptop computer, if you’re quick the worst case scenario is that you might lose the keyboard. I’ve managed to resurrect completely saturated smartphones.
My procedure failed. MacBook Pro computers now make the keyboard extremely difficult to get to. I simply couldn’t get in there promptly. I had to transport the computer to the rice, and in doing so it was carried on its side, potentially allowing liquid to flow into other parts of the computer. And then, in my impatience, I powered it up after just one night on the rice to see how things we going.
How things were going was not at all.
Continue reading “Expensive beer kills computer, honesty kills my budget”