Coffee on Laptop - What to do?

H

Hoppers

New Member
I have a Dell Latitude C610/C510 that had coffee spilled on it while it was running. It appears to be operating fine, but it has some problems:

- The battery, which won't seem to hold a charge, will only charge in the secondary bay. If put into the primary bay, the computer won't even boot up, or it will freeze if it's already running.

- The left mouse buttons don't work at all, while the right mouse buttons do. An external mouse works fine, although when dragging the cursor across the screen, every two inches or so, it will stop just for a split second, and then keep going. This happens with the touchpad, track stick, and external mouse.

- The replacement keyboard I got doesn't work. When I press some keys once, it will spit out a bunch of characters. For example, pressing the "j" key will produce "jkl;". The same goes for the original keyboard. This problem only came up after the cleaning.

I used a toothbrush and 70% rubbing alcohol to clean the area of the motherboard where the touchpad and keyboard connect, as there was some dried up coffee in there. I also cleaned some of the mouse parts on the palm rest. I then let it dry for several days.

Any ideas what the problem could be? I could get a new palm rest, but I don't think that would solve the mouse problem.

Thanks in advance.
 
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How much coffee are we talking about here? I assume the laptop was running when it happened. Was it pluged in? Did it continue to run? Did you leave the battery in it?

The thing is with electronics, they can normally take a fair amount of abuse (my flash drives have been washed many times :P) But if you try to power them before they're completely dry... ZAP. Chances are something's going to short out.

My guess is the coffee shorted something out around your primary bay and there won't be much you can do without replacing the motherboard. Hopefully I'm wrong and someone else will have a better solution. You could try cleaning some more and confirming all the connectors are clean, but it seems you did that :(

Much the same with the mouse. I'm guessing it got shorted out. Most of the time they are replaceable. I'm not completely sure with your laptop, but it might be worth looking into. Plus, confirm the ribbons are nice and secure without any junk on them or the connector.

The keyboard is confusing... About all i can say is confirm the ribbon's are clean and inserted correctly and fully. Though after cleaning, did you just clean the keyboard and start having issues or part of the board? I'm just curious if something else shorted out or something.
 
I'm not sure how much coffee. I believe it was running and plugged in with the battery when it happened. It did continue to run after it was cleaned up.

I actually installed a used keyboard because some keys were broken on the original one. The issue with the keys only came up after the cleaning, and it happens with both the original and the replacement keyboard, but not with an external keyboard.

I am going to take it apart again and see if there's any coffee on the underside of the motherboard. Thanks for the help!
 
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