netbooks and water dont mix

mehmehmeh

So an acquaintance spilled water on their netbook keyboard (NO!) proceeded to leave it plugged in with the battery (NO!!!) Then tried to dry it out with a hair dryer (no! eh... do these get hot enough to do reflow damage? I guess they could have blown water further into the machine, so still a No!!)

I got a hold of it 2 day later. did minor disassembly (cracked the case open and removed keyboard) and let it sit in a warm room with a fan blowing over it for 72 hours. after all that time the keyboard doesn't seem to work in the bios menu.

The screen works for the startup splash screen and bios menu but after the computer attempts to boot into window7 starter edition the screen is blank (will show the green loading bar right before login screen ) same thing with safe mode and a usb windows 7 disc.

I used a usb version of UBCD and the parted magic linux os seemed to load fine with the screen.

I pulled the hard drive and the data seems to be intact, is there anything that can be done with the machine? since even the windows7 installer/safemode don't seem to initialize the video properly. disassemble further and look for the video chip to see if there is moisture shorting it out? Or will it be limited to the most basic of linux distros

mbannick

Maybe windows is trying to initialize the broken keyboard
? Maybe try plugging in a USB keyboard before you boot.

mehmehmeh

thanks, had been testing with both an external keyboard and the built in keyboard plugged in at the same time. I removed the dead keyboard and it works fine with just the external connected. Not so portable anymore. Left click on the trackpad seems to be dead too.

mbannick

Check around the web and see if you can find a replacement keyboard and track pad for cheap but a controller on the motherboard might be fried as well so it's your call.