AAAAAAARGH!

[jojo]

HELP!! My kid has just spilt milk over my laptop, a whole glass full!! I think it's fried, it's not booting up properly(takes a few attempts) and the keyboard is intermittent. I've attempted to strip it down and dry it all off, the harddrive didn't get wet, but the whole keyboard bit did, and where the ribbon which joins onto the motherboard was full of milk.

Time for a new laptop or should I try and get this one fixed?

Does anyone know any laptop repairers in Solihull/Birmingham?

 

[Neilybabs]

"Oh deary me" is something along the lines of what i'd have said!

Sorry dude i've not enough experience with laptops to offer good advice.

Hope it's not completely kaput

 

[rickparmar]

bet it was you jojo with your morning milk,

best thing to do, take all the keys off and keep it in the garage on top of your S3, and let it dry out naturally, will take a few days.

 

[voorhees]

Its no good crying over spilt milk

 

[L1 HCS]

lol - go buy a new one and give this one to little Jo.

 

[mckay9uk]

you should have switched it off straight away turned it upside down and left it for 12 hours if it fails looks like you will have to contact your house insurance, my daughter did mine(thats what i told insurance) i got a new Sony Vaio it cost me £100 excess so i'm happy now. Oh yes i work in I.T.

 

[quattrojames]

Airing cupboard?

It depends on the value of your laptop, but their so cheap these days its hardly worth repairing it ..... When the screen broke on mine I claimed on my home insurance.

 

[jojo]

Its no good crying over spilt milk

I knew this one was coming...

 

[jojo]

Right, I thing it's the keyboard that's goosed, all the keys above the ASDFGHJKL row are not working, but everything below it is... airing cupboard for 12 hours it is then.

 

[TDI-line]

Its no good crying over spilt milk

Nice one.

 

[jojo]

Does anyone know where I can get hold of a Toshiba Satellite Keyboard with black ribbon? I've seen them available on fleabay, but would prefer to buy it somewhere locally near Solihull or Birmingham.

 

[Nilz]

Dude, try PC world, they can normally order the bits in for you, apart from that, your best bet will be the bay..

 

[jojo]

YAYE!, my lappy is back to life with a new keyboard from fleabay. Only problem is, the DVD drive seems goosed and the computer seems to only have 25% of it's speed compared to before, anyone have any ideas on those?

 

[jojo]

Does anyone have any ideas why my computer is so damn slow?! It's running 1GB of RAM, and I'm having problems watching youtube videos and even scrolling as.net pages up and down is not smooth, but loading it up is ok, is my motherboard on my lappy broke?
I'm using windows XP by the way, so it should be pretty fast.

 

[FactionOne]

Hmmm, it's odd that it'd be running normally, just slower, following a post-milk repair...

Slow running like you describe can be caused by quite a few things, but if it's hardware related I'd say normally chipset drivers or video drivers; however if it was a hardware fault with either of those things caused by liquid contamination I'd expect more serious symptoms than just a slow-down... Just out of pure curiosity though, if you right click 'My Computer' pick properties, choose the 'Hardware' tab and go into 'Device Manager' do you see any items either a) listed as 'Other' or 'Unknown' devices, or b) see any devices with an exclamation mark by them?

Regards,

Rob.

 

[rickparmar]

just buy a new laptop

 

[jojo]

Just out of pure curiosity though, if you right click 'My Computer' pick properties, choose the 'Hardware' tab and go into 'Device Manager' do you see any items either a) listed as 'Other' or 'Unknown' devices, or b) see any devices with an exclamation mark by them?

Regards,

Rob.

It's all clear there Rob, I'm scanning my lappy fopr viruses at the mo, and it's taking ages, I even tried doing a system restore, and that took 6 hours lol Would a knackered HD cause the problems I'm experiencing?

 

[FactionOne]

It's a possibility, but again I'm not sure I'd expect this to be the only symptom... You could try running 'chkdsk c: /f' from a command prompt (without the ' ') - that will run a relatively quick check and fix on the disk; if it finds harsh errors it might be worth doing a scandisk too (from system tools), but that can be a PITA...

Regards,

Rob.

PS> Do you know what make the HDD is? If you look at its properties in Device Manager it might advise...

 

[jojo]

Tried the above and it doesn't seem to do anything?, not too sure about the HD brand, there's no markings on it. After tinkering about though, an error came up on the DVD drive, so I removed it and booted the lappy up and things seems to have sped up, but still not as quick before...

I think a new lappy might be the eventual solution, but I'm not a fan of Vista.

 

[FactionOne]

OK, Just to make sure we've got it clear:

Start, Run,

cmd <enter>

chkdsk c: /F <enter>

You could also try without the c: just in case your system partition isn't c:...

It should run for a few minutes, checking file allocation table, indexes and things - if when you've done it as above, nothing happens, let me know and we'll head for plan B.

Also, for your HDD Make/Model - what's shown in the Disk Drives section in Device Manager? (as below)

It's interesting that removing your DVD drive seems to have made it less sluggish - certainly throws me a curve mate. I'm wishing you were just down the road because that would make this a whole lot easier - I'd be quite happy to just have a look...

Regards,

Rob.

 

[jojo]

The thing seems to be back upto speed now, maybe something has dried up? new keyboard is working as it should, but the CD rom is not in situ, I now get an 0203 error when I start up, and I need to click on a 'boot' icon for it to run normally to windows.
I think I'll just use it as it is until it dies Rob, then get me a nice one over Xmas, thanks for your help bud.

 

[FactionOne]

Fair play mate... Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies!

As regards the 0203 error, that's because the CD/DVD drive isn't installed and the BIOS is expecting it to be there...

You've two options:

1) Put it back in and see how it goess
2) Go into the BIOS and set Secondary IDE device to either
a) Not Installed / None
or
b) Auto

...That should stop you getting that error...

Regards,

Rob.

 

[Neilybabs]

......whatever the clever man said ........