Macbook Pro meet bottled water....ARGH!

[ellevan]

I just got an email from my daughter who is teaching in South Korea.  A co-teacher left a bottle of water on the desk that they share and, you guessed it, the water spilled into her laptop.  She has a Macbook Pro, I am still paying for, I have no idea what she has on it other than what it came with.  In any event, she took it home and put it into an obviously large bag of rice, the keyboard was not working at all at first.  Now, she says that the only keys that seem to be affected are the: "It's only the f, r, and 4 keys that do weird things. If I hit them, a slash comes up right after, and if I hit shift and then one of them, this line does: |"  It is not covered with Applecare but she can take it to an Apple store on Friday, she has to use the computer to teach so she can't let it go during the week.  Do you have any idea what I can advise her other than to take it to Apple?  I feel sick to my stomach and I know she does as well.  She is 14 hours ahead of here time wise so it's night time there and she often does not respond to me immediately but I thought I would run this one by all of you and see if you had any suggestions.

I have to go to work in a little while so I might not get back on here until tonight.

Thanks for anything you can possibly suggest.  

[Pete48]

elle....

Oh, crap!  Here's a youtube video that shows how to clean ndividual keys on a MBPro:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSpPlMdGvVI

There are others, so just go to youtube and enter "How to fix a keyboard on a MacBook Pro" and you'll get several other methods.

You can also go to google.com and enter the same question and get other sites like www.howtogeek.com that might have suggestions.

The problem, though, may not be the physical keyboard, but rather the circuit board that connects the keyboard to the motherboard, and that connection may be corrupted so that only certain keys are affected, and those keys are not being recognized properly.  If that's the case, I see no other option but to have Apple replace the keyboard.....sorry.....

Pete

[ellevan]

Thanks, Pete.  I will pass this along to her..CRAP is right.  I was just starting to think I might get this damn thing paid for some day.  Her last one made it through four years of college before it bit the dust.

[Lip Service]

Replacing the keyboard is probably the solution. Until this happens she can just plug in an external keyboard and use that in the mean time

[Pete48]

There is a down side with rice and things like a keyboard that's not present with other electronic devices like a cellphone.  Cellphones are "sealed" with few moving parts on the outside except, perhaps for an on - off button, but things like a keyboard have tons of crevices and small openings that permit all those keypads to move up.down when you type.  Rice, by nature, can be "dusty" with small particles in the bag.  You don't want those small particles of rice to fall into a crack in a keyboard.  

Elle - if your daughter is using rice, I'm thinking she'll need a ton of it because the entire laptop should be  placed on a bed or rice, and the laptop should be opened flat.  THat's a lot of surface area.

Pete

[Pete48]

missed this.....and the laptop should rest on the top of the rice, face down......let gravity do the work!  :)

[Lip Service]

The problem is that gravity will work up to a point, the surface tension of the water is stronger than gravity, so you will have to wait it out to dry.

Since you are getting some response from the "bad" keys, it tells you that these keys have not completely shorted out but are making the wrong connection because of the moisture. Eventually this moisture will go away and the connection would go back to their normal. Maybe a few puffs from a can of compressed air around the "bad" keys would liberate those last holdouts. 

Compressed air cannisters are easy to find 

http://www.amazon.com/Stoner-94203-GUST-Easy-Duster/dp/B0002KKIUA/

At the Apple store they may not need to replace the keyboard but just use the air duster once they open the case, it would be a lot easier to get the moisture out once the case is opened if all the circuits are OK.

[Pete48]

thanks, lip!

as an addition to surface tension and compressed air, if your daughter's in a dry enough locale, simple evaporation will help, too, but I wouldn't recommend the "hair dryer" approach as a speedier alternative.  The problem with evaporation is it'll take a couple of days, but so would the rice technique.

If your daughter requires the laptop to be functioning in a day, then there's no good option except to have Apple folks diagnose and repair/replace.

Pete

[ellevan]

Thanks for all of the advice, I am passing it on to her.  As I said, she is 14 hours ahead of us so it is 7:45PM here and 9:45AM there.  I am not sure what hours she is teaching today but I will forward all of your expertise to her.  I think she has all of her lesson plans for the week on the laptop and she has to have those in order to teach.  I am just sick over this and I know that she is even sicker than I am.  Hopefully, she can get it to the Apple store if nothing else works. I am a little concerned about the dust from the rice now that you brought that up.  She lives in a high rise apartment building, I have no idea about the humidity, it is really cold there outside, like HIGHS in the single digits.  I don't even know what kind of heat she has.  In any event, thank you again, I shall pass all of this along and I will let you know what she lets ME know.

[ellevan]

Just got an email from my daughter..."Sorry it took me so long to respond to this. When I got up this morning, even the problem keys were back to normal. Do you think I should still take it in to the Apple store?"

I told her that I would ask all of you but that if it's working, maybe she really got lucky and she doesn't need to do anything.

Again we have the time difference so it's night time there and morning here but I will email her before I leave for work if I hear from you.

Thanks

[Pete48]

elle....

whistling past the graveyard, huh?  I guess it's probably ok and dried out sufficiently on its own.  Maybe not as much water as first thought got under the hood.

Glad that it worked out....

One thing that I'd recommend is that your daughter launch and use Time Machine each day for backup purposes.  It's built into her Mac, and all she needs is an external drive.  It's easy to use.  Time machine wants to back up changes to the Mac every hour, but that's usually overkill.  There's a 3rd party app called Time Machine Editor that she can find with a google search that permits less frrequent backups and is less annoying than being prompted each hour for the external drive to be plugged in.  She can change the schedule to once a day, at 7pm, say.

Pete

[ellevan]

Thanks, Pete.  I will pass that along to her, she does have an external hard drive so that's a really good idea.  I cannot believe that it is working.  I was sick to my stomach all day at work thinking about it.  Thank you, thank you, thank you!

[ellevan]

Follow up on the water incident...I got this email this morning:

I changed my mind. I'm gonna take it in tomorrow. It's so slow it's not worth trying to use it in class and to lesson plan. Can you ask your computer experts what it might cost? Just ballpark because I know they don't know what's actually wrong


On 2013. 1. 29., at 오후 2:10,

> It looks like I'm going to have to take my computer to the Apple store after all. It's been incredibly slow and yesterday almost ruined two of my classes because I couldn't get it to work and at one point when I restarted it, a screen of squiggly lines showed up which was absolutely terrifying. There's a chance that the slowness isn't related to the water but to harddrive usage or something, but I'm not quite optimistic enough to give it the benefit of the doubt. I'm going to try to wait until Friday so that not having it doesn't totally screw me over for classes and for lesson planning for next week. But then again, considering how it's acting right now, I'm not even sure what help it'll be anyway.
> 
> Hope you're doing well. Sorry to be the bearer of more bad computer news.
>I changed my mind. I'm gonna take it in tomorrow. It's so slow it's not worth trying to use it in class and to lesson plan. Can you ask your computer experts what it might cost? Just ballpark because I know they don't know what's actually wrong

YOU would be my "computer experts" since I have copied and pasted everything you have advised me.  I am not sure you can even make an educated guess on this one but if you think you might be able to, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks