Thinkpads Forum

Hi all,

Well, I'm in the process of recovering from a stupid spill (thankfully, just water) on the keyboard of my R61i. One day later, most is back to normal. A few odds and ends though that perhaps someone could shed some light on:

1) My battery no longer works. I get a blinking orange light, and the status indicator in XP tells me that the battery is damaged. Fair enough... but is there anyone to know if I just need a new battery, or if the entire battery mechanism is screwed (which means new laptop) before I drop some money to order a new battery?

2) When I start up the machine, it hangs at the Lenovo screen. If I hit spacebar, it continues. Or if I hit enter or the ThinkVantage key and then escape out of the options (or go to BIOS setup and escape from there), it continues normally. A minor annoyance, but I feel like it is hanging because there is an error message of some sort that is being hidden by the Lenovo screen... is there any way to check a boot log or something similar?

There are one or two other minor items, but those are the major ones right now. I did a full hard drive scan and it appears to not have suffered any damage. Eight of the keys weren't working last night but are now fine after having had time to dry out. I feel very fortunate to have bought a ThinkPad.

Thanks in advance, everyone.

I've seen this before where a water bath killed batteries. See this thread as an example.

Thanks for the link, Harry. For anyone interested, the relevant post was:

If the batteries got wet, no surprise they died. LiOn batteries have to be kept within a specific voltage range, and if they shorted out and discharged completely from being wet--I'd expect that to kill them. They're terribly fragile little bombs, the battery packs I've seen opened have more on-board charge controller electronics than many gizmos are built from.

The water spill was towards the top of the keyboard, near the monitor, so it certainly makes sense that it could have seeped into the battery and shorted it out. I'm praying that it's just the battery and nothing else, though (which seems possible, since it's able to report that the battery is dead, that tells me the contacts are still in tact).[/quote]