Spilled isoprophol alcohol on my laptop by accident; Please help

[danglesmcnasty]

Hi,

I accidently spilt about a teaspoon of alcohol on my keyboard, and now my keys are dead. When I try to turn it on yesterday, i got that annoying "beeping" noise/alert thing that you get when you have key pressed down. I'm using a different computer at this time because i cannot get past that splash screen. Please advise me on what I need to do. I'd prefer to try to repair it myself, if at all possible. Today, I went on it to see if it worked and the alert was gone, and it went to a page asking me to either boot windows vista, or to boot windows diagnostic tool, but it would not let me select either one, or hit enter or esc to choose them, or go back.

My Computer:
HP Pavillion Notebook dv2-1030us
Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit

 

[Lexluethar]

Sounds like you killed the keyboard. If you know a thing or two about computers you could purchase a new / used keyboard and install it yourself - issue with this is laptops are a pain in the butt to take apart.

Other option is to take it somewhere to install the part, but that will probably cost a good amount of money.

One last option would be to plug in an external keyboard to the USB connector on the laptop and use that. It's ghetto but works.

 

[danglesmcnasty]

Well I tried turning it on to see if an external keyboard would work, and to my surprise, it went past that stupid screen, directly to the log-on screen. I tried the notebook keyboard, and it worked! But god forbid it dies in the future, I'll try the external keyboard, because unfortunately, "ghetto" is in my price range

Thanks so much for your help!!!

hi again well apparently i was wrong only two of the keys on the bottom row work. the space bar does nothing and some keys like the m does y and y does ym. is this a character map thing that i can fix? or something else?
thanks again

 

[Lexluethar]

No, probably dead keyboard because of what happen. You could take the keys off and clean them, but more than likely the scensors under the keyboard are broken.

Same solution, either use an external keyboard or purchase a new laptop keyboard (they aren't universal so purchase one for your laptop). You could also use the 'on screen' keyboard so you'd have to click the keys with your mouse.

 

[wafflehammer]

uhm you could just take it apart and try to dry/clean it...

i don't know the effects of alcohol on computer parts but it can't be too serious :| my dad spilt an entire cup of coffee (those cup things..which are actually like 2 "cups") into a CRT monitor...turned it off...waited a few minutes..turned it back on and it worked lol....don't know how or why..but it did

 

[carnageX]

Alcohol dries faster than water but can still damage components if the unit is on. Some people just get lucky, w hile others unfortunately aren't.

If you're up to it, it wouldn't hurt to take it apart and try to clean it all out. Try looking for a service manual for your laptop online or from the manufacturer if you want.

 

[danglesmcnasty]

OK, thanks for the suggestions. I'll go "ghetto" for now until I can scrape up some money for a new keyboard and labor.

Thanks again!

 

[Harper]

Installing a new keyboard on a laptop is easy. Just have to be careful when removing the actual keyboard itself to make sure you don't break any of the connector to the ribbon cables for the keyboard and mouse.

However you will be needing to spend a bit of money on the laptop keyboard. Laptop parts are expensive as most of the time you have to buy the genunie article. About the only 3rd party part you can get for laptops are Hard Drive, Optical Drive and Ram. (Yes, it's possible with displays too, but that is iffy).

FIrstly what I would be doing is plugging in the a USB keyboard and then just making sure that every thing else works.