T61 survived being drowned

[mikemex]

Yup.

I had a T61p (15.4") lying around, a friend of mine left it to me since the motherboard died from the nVidia bug. I replaced the motherboard with a Penryn compatible one (with intel graphics; they are getting hard to come by it seems) and a T8300 to replace the Merom chip it had. Overall an amazing machine for office work, it's got a 64GB SSD and 4GB of RAM so it's pretty fast and runs unbelievably cool, it normally won't go beyond 30ºC. I gave it to my dad.

Fast forward, it's been raining monsoon style around here and the ceiling developed a leak and my dad woke up to see the laptop totally wet. My first thought when he called me to tell me about it was that were [censored] up since he leaves the machine plugged overnight so it had plenty of power to readily corrode. Resigned, I told him to unplug it and turn it over and let it dry by itself. After a few hours I arrived, opened it up and dried it the best I could and let it dry for the rest of the day.

The machine looked dry the following day so I decided to test it (what could I lose?). To my surprise, when I hit the power button it turned on. But didn't stay that way for long since it suddenly rebooted and turned itself off. But rather than assuming it was dead I decided to take away the CMOS battery and plug it again. And guess what? It turned on once again.

Long tale short, some devices inside a laptop are almost impossible to dry after getting wet and one of such devices is the keyboard. It contains thin membranes that suck water in by capilarity. So when I first turned the machine on, the keyboard failed. The screen also contains membranes for the reflector and polarizer so it still contains water (it can be seen looking at it from the side), but it doesn't seem to affect its operation. Luckily, water was sucked in from below and screens (at least the old CCFL ones) don't have much if anything in the underside.

It's been working fine for a couple of weeks. I just had to replace the keyboard. A reminder on why to choose a Thinkpad. Or at least, the old ones.