Following Hugh's comments on keyboard cleaning in missing *T* thread, I thought it worth running this by you.
Daughter's relatively young Mac laptop drenched in coffee while running. Repair estimate of several hundred ukp.
Do I show interest or keep my head well down? Apart from Geof's facilities at Watford, I don't have access to cleaning baths or any serious electronic testing tackle.
Model unknown to me but I could find out.
regards
I have tried to sort out three of wifes Macs keyboards with zero success.
Keep head well down. ;-) IT support for friends & family is a thankless = task and leads to long-term dependancy & grief.
Worth checking your house contents insurance if it happened in your own = home. If you have an "All risks" policy it should be covered.
Tim
Does a new one cost more than the repair?
When (if) repaired, is it worth that much?
I'd not even try, and I've fixed loads of laptops .. water/coffee/liquid gets everywhere and can leave residues that aren't immediately obvious and which can show up later having 'eaten' a track off a pcb ...
Personally I'd try a claim on home insurance first .. ;)
If you can whistle, walk away slowly while carrying an innocuous tune that conveys complete lack of technical skills :).
In general, limit technical input to other peoples' computer problems to the phrase: "have you tried switching it off and on again?"
(unless it was you who drenched it in coffee, in which case blame the dog).
Oh, whats so "speacial" about a mac keyboard then? With PC ones you can strip 'em down was the bits under the tap dry off, place in airing cupboard to dry completely for 24 hrs and reassemble. Done it several times.
A repair estmate of "several hundred ukp" sounds very much like a rip off, surely even Apple can't justify more tha =A350 for a brand new keyboard.
spilling coffee into a laptop can damage far more than the keyboard.
OP said it was a laptop which was running at the time - the keyboard's probably not the half of it Mike
That is where separate Apple keyboards START mate. Now consider this is a laptop...so it will be crammed in tighter than a sumo wrestlers jockstrap..and all integrated with the motherboard..
Indeed - with a basic separate desktop keyboard. But I'd guess it isn't that simple with a laptop. Especially a Mac.
Do you have a way of getting data off the hard drive if you pull it from the machine (or does she have a recent enough backup that she doesn't care)?
What a (good) professional repair place might have is a stash of known- good parts, so they can test keyboard, system board, PSU etc. in isolation and only source/replace what's needed; it's a bit more difficult at home (i.e. you might decide that the system board is dead and order a replacement from somewhere, but then when you get it you find that half the keys on the keyboard* don't work and the most economical thing to do would be to replace that, too)
If it were me I'd still do a dismantle/clean/dry/reassemble process and just see - but there's no guarantee there'd be a working machine at the end of it all (so it's more a case of setting expectations beforehand - "I'll take a look" vs. "I'll fix it")
cheers
Jules
And, depending on the model and how old it is you may need a pentalobe screwdriver to get anywhere near the insides.
Offer to buy her a second hand one. 2nd hand PC laptops are from about =A3160 with Vista and =A3180 with Win 7 around here. (Newcastle U Lyme.)
But you can get a complete station desktop running windows XP complete with desk and scanner/printed for about =A3130.
To anyone for whom a Napple Laptop is a must-have, drinking coffee whilst using it is a must not. Your daughter is not in that category.
Once you have prised her warm, sticky hands from her hot, cookied computer, you can play with it to your hearst's content.
Major strip-down and rinse followed with a rinse or three of distilled or deionised water. And several weeks in the hairy cupboard.
Should be fixed in time for Christmess and make someone a really crappy resent.
Well I'm that Hugh and I hate laptops because they are so difficult to change or repair anything. I wouldn't touch it. Tough life lesson unfortunately.
Nice tower and separate bits mean I can't fill it with coffee or other drinks. If a part fails or I want to upgrade the possibilities are there.
But ...... soon we are anticipating living parts of the year in Spain and parts in the UK.
Do we get laptops (with separate keyboards and monitors) that we can move around or do we use desktops in each location and use the cloud a lot?
Might be posting soon on
advice on how to winterise UK house and make it more secure.
and OT
where do I say I am based? Taxes for us work out about the same but you cannot be resident for health services in 2 countries at the same time I understand.
I want some sort of broadband and mobile phone availability including data whenever I am in either country.
Think I'd better get a bigger hard drive to handle all the info I need to gather. The list is endless.
it's not just the price of the keyboard, it's the time it takes to disassemble and reasmeble everything. And that's provided the liquid did no other damage than to the KB which is unlikely in a laptop. Macs are also more precision made and don;t come apart quite as easily as most PC laptops.
here's a utub vid of how to take apart a trypical mac laptop.
Someone should do an iPhone/iPad app to emulate that for April
1st :-)
This is a cheap and quick way to take apart a Mac laptop:
Even my wife has managed to not kill her laptop yet. Liquid on keyboard is a danger, but they should be designed to stop the liquid getting further than that - I've replaced one keyboard so far.
Even round the house I like the portability of a laptop - can't use a desktop while lounging on the sofa...
set up your won cloud with an online virtual server.
Then set up desktops. desktop is less than 200 if you take the screen and keyboard with you.
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