A surprise and mysterious X61s survival from keyboard spill

[ayl2008]

It is a X61s. My wife spilled some water on the right lower side of the keyboard and she kept using the laptop for several hours. Then the next morning, when we opened it, it said "invalid remote change requested" on a dark screen and halted there. Tried it several times and then it is no display at all except some bee sound.

I disconnected battery and power, took out the keyboard, and used a hair dryer to blow the affected area with cool air. But no luck.

Then I started to give up on saving the laptop and think about saving the hard drive. I went to best buy to buy a closure for the HD. The technical staff said that in most cases, if you can not turn on the computer after spill, it is almost certain that the main board is dead and you should look for a new system. But he did hint about entering BIOS setup and see if I can do it and observe anything.

So I came back and did it. I did not see anything (I am not an expert on hardware). I did restore it to the default BIOS settings. I also hit ThinkVantage and enter the safe mode. Nothing did I change. I then restart and was thrilled to see that the system was starting up the Windows Vista, although it showed the startup menu, saying it was not normally shut down last time. To be safe, I selected the safe mode. Vista was started in safe mode without anyting strange. Then restart with normal mode, looking good.

Anything insight on what could have happened? Should I relax now?

[ZaZ]

Anything insight on what could have happened? Should I relax now?

You got lucky. Something may or may not happen down the road. Hard to say if you can relax.

[DWSpiro]

I have to say I had a similiar miraculous experience a few months ago. Quite a large glass of water fell on my keyboard. I immediately shutdown, turned the machine upside down, and let what could drain out. Then I literally took the whole thing apart. Took out the hard drive, disconnected the keyboard (and let it hang on its side), took out the battery and the RAM, and left the whole thing sitting upside down.

I was totally convinced it was dead in the water (so to speak), but after a couple hours, I reconnected everything and it worked perfectly! I was amazed, but chalk it up to less and less exposed parts that are subject to damage from even liquid - and maybe the fact that I acted quickly.

Whatever it was, I'm happy it didn't fry my whole machine!

[pgoelz]

Water all by itself is not that destructive. The problem is that water in conjunction with a voltage will form conductive deposits as the water evaporates with voltage applied. And THAT can kill your laptop. The deposits can be removed where they are accessible, but they can form under devices and can be near impossible to get at.

If you immediately power off, remove the main and backup batteries and then completely remove all traces of moisture from EVERYWHERE and let it dry thoroughly, the device will likely survive.