Chosen Solution
Hi, I stupidly spilled tea on my laptop (it’s a very old laptop but still working perfectly fine, well, used to), the tea mostly went over the right side of the keyboard. So I unplugged it, tipped it upside down & left it. I don’t believe much tea was spilled but after an hour, I just wanted to see if the laptop was functioning at all. I turned it on no problem but when I went to test the keyboard, most of the right side wasn’t working (well they were kinda working, for example I’d press ‘m’ & ‘m#’ would come up, the return key seems to the back space tab etc). If I continue to let it dry, will the keys right itself or is it completely beyond hope? Thanks in advance.
Laptop keyboards usually do not survive liquid spills - even in business models with drainage holes. Head onto eBay and buy one just in case because the odds are very much against you. Hopefully it isn’t a plastic weld design failure where you need to buy the palmrest or use JB-Weld to hold it in. What you need to do is take the laptop apart and clean the motherboard using this guide. If you have an ultrasonic cleaner that’s the absolute best way to clean water damage, but most people don’t have one at their disposal. In lieu of that, 99% IPA and an anti-static brush will work. To be absolutely sure, clean the entire board - even the parts you don’t suspect were part of the tea spill. We can’t help you find the guides needed without a model. In addition to cleaning it, use this time to repaste the CPU and clean the dust bunnies out. Since you need to do a complete teardown on many Acer laptops to do this, getting it out of the way now is ideal. I don’t recommend Artic Silver 5 for laptops since it doesn’t seem to cure right for me (and many laptops are a pain to redo), so for this I’d buy Artic MX-4. Refer to this guide to see how to change it.
well you may need to use some alcohol on that area
