Slight water spillage on my precious M17x

Hello all

I have recently accidentally spilt some water which seeped into the touchpad area and even more slightly in the spacebar area. This caused some problems such as stuttering audio and the light around to touchpad to flicker and change colour itself. I immediately switched the laptop off and cleaned it the best I could and blowdried the wet areas. I turned the laptop upside down and took out the battery cartridge which was right underneath the touchpad and I saw that some water leaked through it. I cleaned it up immediately.

When I turned on the laptop without plugging in the charger, I noticed that my laptop performance lagged. But when I booted the laptop with the charger plugged in, it worked smoothly and normally. Then when I took it out and try to put it back in, it still lagged and I found out it will only work smoothly if I boot the laptop with the charger in the whole time and not take it out.

I also noticed in the bottom right corner icon that it says that my battery cannot be detected (a battery with a red 'x' over it). I drew the conclusion that the water must have affected the battery but did not affect my plugged in laptop. And now the battery can be detected and says it's fully charged. I am literally sitting and staring at the screen hoping and praying nothing else goes wrong.

What should I do? I called Alienware support and they said that I might have to give the laptop in for replacement but I don't want the risk of not being able to salvage my hard drive. The tech guy also said that I may have to give it up for up to 2 weeks and that is time I'm not willing to wait as I require my laptop 24/7 for gaming and work purposes. I asked if it was possible to send a tech in just to take a look and maybe bring a replacement battery instead and he said he would need to talk to the tech superiors to see, as usually 'customer-caused damage incidents' such as these aren't covered in my premium warranty package and I might have to pay for a tech coming in since it's my fault for spilling.

As a whole my prime suspect is the battery being the only thing which was affected and everything else works perfect. It's just the lag/slowdown in scrolling, executing files, typing etc. if it were unplugged and I'd have to just restart with it plugged in for everything to be back to normal.

Any advice and help would be greatly appreciated.

David

 

First of all, if it boots up fine then back up your data IMMEDIATELY. A computer that has been through any kind of trauma should be considered volatile. If you care at all about your files, back them up as soon as possible.

Second, you don't have much of a choice. Send it in for repair and be more cautious next time. If you have the accidental damage warranty, you're lucky that all it cost you was a few weeks without it. You're actually lucky it even works at all right now. It's unlikely that the battery was damaged at all. It's much more likely the bridge between the laptop and the battery was.

Also, never blow dry a laptop. The air has a chance of generating a static charge that could easily have destroyed the laptop, and that wouldn't have been covered under warranty. It could also easily overheat parts or push water even deeper.

Go to a rent-to-own store and get a replacement laptop for a few weeks, it's usually 7-8 bucks a week. Obviously you will most likely not be able to game on it but that is the least of your worries at this point.

 

Meh. Turn the heat in your house up to 80 and let it dry out for awhile. It should seriously be fine man.

 

From what you described your laptop is just fine.
blowdrying it won't cause anything i always do it to accelerate drying of different boards from mobile phones laptops/desktops etc. for years now.
When you spill liquid on a laptop/phone etc just unplug the battery or any other power source and dry it (i clean the boards with alcohol when people come to me just to make sure) before you turn it on again.
What i would do is unplug the CMOS battery along with any power source(battery and charger) take it appart and clean everything with alcohol(pharmacy 90°) and dry it.
When dry,assemble and it should work,if it's already working like this then you're just fine,nothing is broken!

 

Thanks all for the feedback!

@Akari : As a precaution I will backup the data immediately. Thank you!

The primary source of water seepage was the touchpad area, in between the gaps of the click buttons. What hardware could be affected in this area besides the battery?

@TurbodTalon : Would it really be fine man? You had a personal experience like this before? I mean looking at how my laptop performs normally right now I am suspecting that it has probably dried up. But then the water doesn't cause any permanent damage in this case does it? Is that why you said it's just fine if it dries up?

@katalin : I've never disassembled this laptop before although I did desperately try to unscrew the backs just to clean any excess water lingering on the hardware but I could only manage to get one screw out and gave up on the rest. I just cleaned the best I could from any moisture I could see and that was it. Are you really sure it's fine? I hope you're right man

EDIT : What about those aforementioned symptoms such as the touchpad light changing itself to green/teal then back to blue on its own? Also the battery icon on the lower right crossing itself out and saying it cannot be detected but now it can be detected and it's fully charged 100%?

 

Yeah, viruz, I think you'll be okay as long as you get it nice and dried out. If you lived near me I would help you disassemble a few parts and blow it out with my air compressor. As long as water hasn't reached any mechanical drive parts or brought dirt into places it shouldn't be, you'll recover fine.

 

Haha thanks VoiceInTheWilderness. I'm sure Orange County is lovely this time of year But what parts are we talking about exactly beneath the Touchpad?

 

Air compressors and hair dryers are bad ideas. As much as they may work, it's very risky compared to just letting it air dry and won't get you any further.

The damage to a laptop from water happens while there is still power to the laptop. Always power the computer off and disconnect the battery/AC adapter immediately. You can also remove the CMOS battery. After that point, there's really no more damage that can be done by the water and it should be left to dry.

Basically a short circuit can fry components by exposing them to much more power than they are used to. If you own a multimeter you can check if the battery is the issue. If it is not, then the motherboard has been damaged and may need to be replaced.

 

I've had a similar instance where I spilled a glass of water directly on my laptop keyboard (not my m17x)...and I did simliar to what other are suggesting..unplugged it, took out the battery, wiped it up the best I could..turned it upside down and left it for 24 hours to dry out completely. The key is to allow plenty of time for it to dry out before attempting to power it back on..powering it back on while the components are potentially wet just provides another opportunity for things to short out. But I agree with most others, unplug it, remove the battery, turn it upside down to allow any remaining water to dry out/leak out and leave it alone for a day or two. Then try it again and see how things go.

Best of luck, I hate it when that happen.

 

My wife spilled tequila over his HP lappy... I did my best to recover it (the tequila not the lap!!!!)

i swear it is a true story... (the laptop was replaced after that, it didn't make it..lol)

 

The water isn't what hurts anything, it's the electricity, as previously stated. They actually submerse entire PCs in mineral oil for extreme cooling. Mineral Oil Submerged Computer; Our Most Popular Custom PC Mineral oil is not electrically conductive though. If it is all dried out and all is working correctly, you're fine.

 

if it boot its fine my m17 drank a full glass of rhum and coke result it's still there and kicking

 

That's pretty sweet granyte. The only thing that would suck about that is the sticky crap all over.

 

Once spilled water on my T61p. Laptop immediately turned itself off. Left it to dry in the trunk of my car (live in a very hot area). After 48 hours, turned it back on and it was like nothing had ever happened.

Someone reported that compressed air can damage the cooling fans or other components. Use it very carefully.

 

So all the aforementioned symptoms earlier when the spillage occurred should be nothing to worry about?

And what about the fact that the laptop wouldn't turn on unless my charger was plugged in?

Thank you all so much for the feedback and encouragement!!!

 

Well my Mom spilt whole 8oz of soda on her laptop. Well I took the Laptop apart and use Isopropyl Alcohol To clean all the eletronic parts. Then I put all the Parts behind My Alienware M17x R2 Laptop and Dried them out. While Playing Lord of the Rings. Put the laptop togetther. Turn it on and the laptop work.

I can hear my dad going it never going to work it never going to work. By this time We had a New Gateway Laptop.

My dad Face was Dumbfounded. Now he useing it becuse His laptop a Pro Star P4 EE 3.4ghz laptop Died after 7 years of use.

 

Akari,why is it risky to blow dry components?? I've been doing this for years now and it's actually a good idea(doesn't let the liquid spread more).

AtolSammeek +1 on using Isopropyl alcohol(prevents any oxide of the circuits).

Try to messure your battery also did you remove the CMOS battery and pressed the power button for a while(~20sec) without the power cord pluged of course.

 

Key - allow a lot of drying time. Stay offline for a few days I know that's hard. But if there is any residual liquid and you are "running" the machine, you can continue to cause damage. Drying devices are really only accelerating drying and carry "some" risk. Best is to let everything dry and give air circulation a chance to do it's thing. Don't open the battery, by the way.

See you in a few days and you should be fine.

 

Thanks FXi. I've done as you said and so far so good.

However there is one thing that just cropped up. I hear some "clicking" noises and I noticed it came from the main power button (the alien head) and it usually clicks when it's loading or processing something (when the alien eyes blink). It's not the usual low decibel click when it's loading up something. It's slightly louder and it suddenly started while I was watching american idol on it.

Is this a bad sign? What should I do? Is there a way I can perform some system check to see if any of the hardware has gone wonky?

 

Hello all here's a little update on what's been going on.

So far so good to be honest, nothing drastic has been going on except for one thing.

This is particularly tedious and annoying sometimes, but sometimes randomly, my m17x suddenly acts as if the battery charger is unplugged. I can sense this due to sudden laggy internet browsing, right clicking desktop and clicking refresh is slower to load the desktop icons etc. even though it is still plugged in.

Sometimes I notice this outright when I'm trying to load a game and it lags SO bad despite the fact that I checked my graphics settings and it's using the 260M GTX one.

Several restarts and it didn't help till I figured just unplug and plug the charger again while booting and voila it's back to normal again. This has become a staple action for me when one moment I'm browsing and fiddling with my laptop and when I go off to take a break and come back the problem starts again and I'll have to reboot and unplug/plug the charger again.

Sometimes this problem doesn't even happen at all so you can see this is VERY random.

Any ideas on what I should do or should I just stick with this routine and hope it goes off by itself?

 

Put it in your oven, very low heat for 10-15min.

 

??? are you serious? what does this do?

 

What kind of advice is this?

@virus777 there can be many reasons you have those simptomes!
Tell us first what BIOS version are you running,OS drivers etc.

cheers

 

Hi thanks katalin
i was a little scared there thinking that that's really what users with my problem do, put the laptop in the oven xD

Anyway, i'm still very new with this, where can I find what BIOS version i'm running and OS drivers etc?

 

when you turn on your laptop press F2 and you should find the BIOS version (eg A03)
For video driver version right click your desktop > choose nVidia Control Panel > (left lower corner) click system information and a window should pop up with Driver Version: xxx.xx
Are you running Windows 7 or Vista?