What usually gets affected with liquid damage (laptop & tablet)

demonikal

demonikal

New Member
I was coming back from overseas and a bottle of Hraki (Greek liquor) broke in my luggage (carry-on) when my backpack fell out of the backseat of the car when I opened the door. My Dell XPS 13 laptop and Google Nexus 7 were in there. I immediately put them in dry rice for about 4 days. Nada. They won't turn on and I've had them plugged in for 2 days since then. My Nexus warranty was only 12 months and I got in the Fall of 2012 and it doesn't cover liquid-damage anyway. My laptop warranty is also over.

The Nexus, I have no idea what I'm go to do with that. Probably try opening it up eventually for the heck of it, if I know what to replace. But it's an 8 gigabyte Nexus 7, so it might not be worth it to mess around with it. Might just be worth it to buy a 16 GB or 32 GB one.

With the laptop, well that I'm more concerned about because it had for just over one year and I got a lot of use out of it. I just ordered a small tool set for less than $4 that had a T-5 torx bit in it, since I didn't have one that small, but I don't know what to look for - and generally, I don't know what liquid damage usually affects first or the most (i.e. battery only, or motherboard, battery, and just about everything). I figured since this was 40% alcohol, it might actually be less damage than if it had been water, since a lot of the alcohol might have evaporated off, but I don't know that for sure.

So,, really I'm just curious what kind of damage I should look for and if anyone thinks it's worth me buying refurbished parts on Ebay for my Dell XPS 13, if it comes to that.
 
I would personally imagine the motherboard is damaged, can you figure out if it is charging at least? Like doe a light come on when plugged in?

Buy parts on ebay is not so bad as long as the reseller you are trying to buy from has a goof reputation.
 
DMGrier said:
I would personally imagine the motherboard is damaged, can you figure out if it is charging at least? Like doe a light come on when plugged in?

Buy parts on ebay is not so bad as long as the reseller you are trying to buy from has a goof reputation.
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The only light that comes on is the actual A/C adapter, but that light will come on even when it's plugged into the wall and not into the laptop. When the laptop, the XPS 13, isn't charged fully, even if it's turned off, a thin LED light at the front of the laptop is supposed to blink. There's nothing and it's been plugged in for days now.

I suppose I'll go on Ebay and try to sell the Nexus 7, denoting liquid damage. I don't know what can be salvaged, but who knows.

Do you think the Solid State Drive in the laptop can be salvaged/recoverable? Even it can, I don't know how the heck I would get the data off it, since it's an internal drive for laptops.
 
Okedokey said:
I don't think the booze killed, them rather the fall. Check for mechanical damage.
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That's a good point. I didn't even think of that possibility, although there's no cracked screens or anything that would denote external damage. I get my torx bit tomorrow in the mail, so I'll be able to open up the laptop and see what's what. Maybe I'll even include pictures here, if I can figure out how to add pictures :D
 
The problem with liquids getting inside a laptop is that the liquid will short-circuit components and destroy them. Even after the liquid has dried or been absorbed by rice, the damage has already been done.
 
OvenMaster said:
The problem with liquids getting inside a laptop is that the liquid will short-circuit components and destroy them. Even after the liquid has dried or been absorbed by rice, the damage has already been done.
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Okay thanks, OvenMaster. I didn't think about that either. I just got my T5 bit today, so I'll be opening up the laptop over the weekend. Hopefully, I can still salvage the SSD. That's all I really care about. There was only about 50GB of data on it, and probably less than 20GB that I really would have liked to keep.

Lesson learned: back everything up to the cloud.
 
Yeah the impact of electrical conductivity is very very low. I would say not the issue at all. Liquids do their damage via corrosion, not short circuits, and in this case id say its an issue related to dropping it.
 
Okedokey said:
Yeah the impact of electrical conductivity is very very low. I would say not the issue at all. Liquids do their damage via corrosion, not short circuits, and in this case id say its an issue related to dropping it.
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I respectfully disagree. You dump a liquid into a running laptop or any other electrical device, it's going to short things out real fast. Corrosion that would kill components takes a long, long time.
 
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