[ale] [OT] Gimme a D, gimme an O, gimme an H, gimme a !

[James P. Kinney III]

Rubbing alcohol was a very bad idea. It will likely destroy the membrane
on the keypad. Every laptop I've disassembled has a detachable (in some
manner) keyboard. You need to get the key board removed from the rest of
the laptop and flush it out with warm water. The final rinse of water
should be with distilled water. That way when it dries there will be no
mineral deposit residue.

Drying time will be very, very, very long. The ideal drying condition
would be to put it in a sealable box and pull a slight vacuum on the
system for several hours. This will evaporate the water with out heat.
The next recommendation is to go buy several boxes of ordinary chalk,
put them on a pan and bake them at 250F for an hour to drive off any
moisture. Take the cooled chalk and the keyboard and seal them up in a
large plastic bag for several days. You might want to change the chalk
after each day. If you have access to laboratory dessicant, that would
be even better.

Start calling the repair shops and look for a replacement keyboard. The
alcohol has likely made the lifespan on the membrane very short.

Bummer.

I spilled a very large mug of coffee, with sugar and milk, into a
keyboard once. That was a bad day, too.

On Sat, 2002-09-14 at 03:15, Joseph A Knapka wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I have done something bad. To wit, I dumped about half a pint of
> Pepsi (note: no longer an Atlanta resident, therefore free to drink
> whatever I want) on my laptop.
> 
> I immediately popped the keycaps off the affected keys, grabbed
> some cotton swaps, looked for a bottle of rubbing alchohol, didn't
> find it, went to the local drugstore, bought a bottle of rubbing
> alchohol, returned home (elapsed time roughly 20 minutes), and
> carefully cleaned both the keycaps and the keyboard mechanism
> beneath.
> 
> Still, things are Not Right. I'm getting periodic random keystrokes
> when my fingers are nowhere near the keyboard; obviously
> I didn't clean up everything that needed cleaning. So am I just
> screwed here, or what? Any advice?
> 
> Many thanks,
> 
> -- Joe
> 
> 
> 
> ---
> This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
> See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
> sent to listmaster at ale dot org.
-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 



 This is a digitally signed message part