Posts Tagged ‘water damage’
Rescuing a Water Damaged Laptop Display
On the evening before the Sinhala and Tamil New Year (13th of April) I was as usual sitting in front of my laptop browsing away. (I do that a lot. Hence the blog title). Anyway out of the blue my mom calls me downstairs for tea and tells me to bring the mugs that I’ve taken upstairs but never really returned. For some reason or other I really felt the need to take my laptop downstairs with me. So I unplugged it and closed the lid and took it in my hand.
When I went to get the mugs I saw there are 3 mugs there. So I get the very bright idea of using the laptop as a tray. (I’m really smart aren’t I? Keep reading) So I put one mug turned down so it would wobble less on the laptop. So far so good. There goes the second mug. And here goes the third mug as well. Piece of cake right? Wrong! As my luck would have it, unnoticed by me there was a little water left in the third mug and it went all over the laptop.
Panic!! Laptop!! Water!!! DON’T MIX!!
But keeping a cool head I put down the cups and immediately took the battery out of the laptop. Ok. Breathe. . . Right. Then I took the first piece of cloth that caught my sight (Which incidentally, happened to belong to my sister. Oh well… 
) and wiped the laptop clean. Seemed like no water had reached the keyboard or the vents. So far so good. That meant there could be minimal chance of damage. Holding my breath I inserted the battery in and switched it on.
Fortunately it worked Ok. By Ok I mean it switches on and can do anything I did before. But on the top right edge of the display there was a huge patch of water. Almost like a cloud. 
What could I do? As it was my sheer idiocy that resulted in this outcome I resigned to accept the consequences. My dear laptop isn’t even 6 months old.
Then I logged on and did a bit of googling to look at my options. Which did not look very good. I thought of using a hair dryer to dry the water out. But I found a post in a forum advising against it because the heat could damage the screen further.
I also found a very helpful disassebly guide to take apart the LCD screen. (I can’t seem to find the link right now. If I find it again I’ll post it here) Looking at it, and considering my luck I decided I’ll most probably end up doing more damage than good if I tried that.
Feeling utterly helpless I finally posted about my misfortune on my Twitter with a Twitpic. After I told about what happened Kalinga he suggested that I keep the laptop near a tungsten bulb to dry it out.
He also adviced me to keep checking the temperature regularly to make sure it doesn’t heat up too much. To an LCD display over 60-70 degrees celcius is too much in case you’re wondering what is too much.
This idea appealed to me as well. So I emptied a space in a wardrobe, put my lappy on a dry towel and also put in an old table lamp with a 40W bulb. (I removed the Lampshade obviously)
After 5 or 6 hours in my new “oven” the cloud seemed to be fading a little. A little feeling of hope. Can it actually work?
After a full 36 hours (a little more or less. I did’t keep track of time that accurately 
) the cloud had completely vanished. It’s almost like nothing had happened. Take a look for yourself.
Thanks to Kalinga and his bright idea I got my laptop back just as it was. A little piece of advice. Don’t do the stupid thing I did. Then you can avoid this entire episode. (Of course you’re not as stupid as me. What was I thinking? )
