spill over x31 keyboard, laptop appears dead

[axc]

Hi,

My friend spilt beer onto the keyboard of her x31 while it was on, and it stopped working as a result. She also says at some point later she tried reconnecting it to the mains and the LED worked briefly. She gave it to me and now it appears completely dead.

Can anyone speculate as to which components could have been affected? I have removed the keyboard and can see small sticky beer stains on the underside, mostly where the PC card slot and modem is so perhaps components on the motherboard short circuited?

I also have her old x22, which has a broken screen but which otherwise seems to work fine with a vga monitor. She asked me whether it might be possible to interchange some components to make one fully functional... I highly doubt that myself, but I put that to you!

In any case, I rescued all her data from the HD so thats the most essential job done.

Thanks for your help!

[hunterman223]

I read somewhere that you can clean the whole thing with distilled water and let it dry. Remove the motherboard by following the IBM hardware maintainance manual. Take everything off of it so that you can get it as clean as possible. Gently scrub off the bear with the distilled water. Then let it air dry overnight or as long as possible. Clean off everything else that got wet. If you are unable to de-sticky the keyboard, get a new one off of ebay. With any luck after it turns on it will work fine. However, it all depends on luck, timing, and where it was spilled. The quicker you turned it off the better. And obviously, it it started smoking or there was a nice display of fireworks than your chances are somewhat slim. Good luck!

I found a video of this technique here.