About a week ago a friend of mine phoned in a panic caused she'd just spilt some tea on the corner of her laptop while it was running. I told her to turn it straight off and leave it somewhere warm for at least 24hrs, which she did. Whenever she turned it again, it POSTed okay and windows loaded fine. The problem is since then, anytime it's used for more than 5-10 minutes, weird things start happening, help screens appear or the keyboard just stops working which made me wonder if it is overheating as it still POSTs okay everytime you start up. It seems though, the hotter the cpu gets, the less it will do, to the point where if you restart the laptop, it will POST okay, you hear a beep but then the screen just goes black and you hear continuous beeps. I've worked on some PCs but never really a laptop, hence the following simple questions:

(1) Is the CPU fan in a laptop always meant to be spinning like in a PC?
(2) Is there more than one fan in a laptop?

Any help with this would be much appreciated. In case it's helpful, the area were the tea was spilt was over the Esc and Tab keys are and the exhaust part of the heatsink. Upon inspection inside, there did seem to be some residue on both sides of the heatsink. Would this be solved maybe, just by replacing the cooling unit? Many thanks!

Was it just the corner, that is not where the esc and tab keys are located?

Laptop cooling fan only power on when required. This is a power saving consideration. Usually there is only one, though some have fans in tandem.

I think that it is likely that there is still some 'tea' in the keyboard. This would cause the continuous beeps to indicate that the keyboard buffer was full (keystrokes that it remembers if you type too fast). Also the help screens are activated by the F1 key, not too far from the esc and tab.

Removing a keyboard is not normally all that difficult. Do you have a make and model? I've never cleaned a laptop keyboard, but I might be able to help you get it out.

Hey,
thanks for the reply, yeah, it was the top left corner (of the keyboard anyway). I'll get a make and model either tonight or tomorrow and post back. I know it's a HP but not sure what model. So hopefully it'll just be a matter of removing the keyboard and giving it a good clean? That'd be excellent, many thanks!

Modern keyboard use three sheets of mylar (plastic) to form the contacts. The outer two sheets contain contacts while the middle sheet has holes where the contacts are and keeps them apart. If liquid gets in between these sheets, it can remain there and cause lots of problems. As you now know!

Hi,
the laptop is a Packard Bell Versa E400, does that sound right? I actually had a go at taking the bottom off it last week, got all the screws out but there was still something holding it on, possibly the hard drive casing, would you normally have to take the hard drive out before you get the laptop case off do you know? Will I have to do this to get the keyboard out as well? Thanks!

Sorry, I don't have detailed instructions for Packard Bell laptops. Maybe someone reading might.

Generally you can't remove the bottom of a laptop. It's normally the last bit left after you have removed the mainboard.

The usual way of removing the keyboard is to remove three or four screws from the underside. Then you lift the keyboard (often) on the right hand side at the blank key, romove the ribbon cable(s) and you're done.

As I mentioned before, I've never disassembled a laptop keyboard before, so I can't offer too much advise on that either.

Hi,
I got the keyboard off okay, actually came off pretty easy once I got the keyboard brace from the front. Anyway, I gave it a good clean and put it back in. Whenever I started it up again, I ran CHKDSK from the Recovery Console which found some errors so I got it to search for bad sectors and all that and basically, from what my friend tells me, it's now okay again so thanks very much for all your help. There was just a couple of things I noticed though which you might have an idea about. When you go into Device Manager, the screen is window is empty, I mean, it has the toolbar and all but where the list of devices is meant to be, it's just blank. Any ideas why? Also, I found that there's a 2GB partition, labelled something like 'Non-OS2 boot something...' which doesn't show up in My Computer. Which reminds me actually, one time when I ran FIXMBR from Recovery Console, I got some kind of error message about it having some kind of Non OS2 record or something? Sorry for being so vague, didn't note this stuff down when it happened. Think a clean install is the best bet?

Seems that they didn't hide that partition well enough. It contains all software install files used to restore the computer to factory state. This allows the recovery disk to fit onto a floppy disk.

Now that you know how easy it is to reformat, you could try fixing windows first. From a command prompt (run 'cmd') type 'sfc /scannow' (there's a space before the /). This will look for and replace damaged system files. Of course a system restore may still be available.

Thanks again, I'll hopefully be able to try that this weekend. What is the sfc command though (just out of curiousity)? I don't remember seeing it listed in Recovery Console, y'know, when you type HELP for a list of commands. Thats were I found DISKPART which showed me that 2GB partition I mentioned earlier. Cheers

Recovery console is I believe a vendor supplied aplet. As such I'm not famliar with it. SFC or System File Check is part of windows. It will check for changes in important system files and replace them if necessary. Of course it will want to replace files that have been updated which is why it's not used very often.

Generally, I advise against running programs unless you know exactly what they do. I still have nightmares from the time my son called out "Dad, how do I use deltree?"

Hhmmm....I tempted to use it, just cause I never have before and I'd like to see if it'll fix it but seeing as it's not my computer and as far as my friend knows, it's fixed, I'll maybe not and just run it on my own sometime, just to see...
Cheers anyway. Thanks again for all the help!

To be honest, i've never used SFC myself. I understand that it asks if you want to replace each file that it finds that has changed since the initial install. This could lead to major version conflicts given the size and quantity of windows updates.

Best to leave well enough alone. I'm not entirely sure that the anomallies you saw weren't Packard Bell features.